Integrating Information Literacy into the Virtual University: A Course Model

published or submitted for publicatio

A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources

A BASILar Approach for Building Web APIs on top of SPARQL Endpoints

The heterogeneity of methods and technologies to publish open data is still an issue to develop distributed systems on the Web. On the one hand, Web APIs, the most popular approach to offer data services, implement REST principles, which focus on addressing loose coupling and interoperability issues. On the other hand, Linked Data, available through SPARQL endpoints, focus on data integration between distributed data sources. The paper proposes BASIL, an approach to build Web APIs on top of SPARQL endpoints, in order to benefit of the advantages from both Web APIs and Linked Data approaches. Compared to similar solution, BASIL aims on minimising the learning curve for users to promote its adoption. The main feature of BASIL is a simple API that does not introduce new specifications, formalisms and technologies for users that belong to both Web APIs and Linked Data communities

Exploring metadata standards for competence descriptions in the business & management domain

This paper explores the development and use of competency metadata standards. As there has recently been a surge of a number of standards to address the challenge of representing competencies and there is a rising need to develop a common methodology, as well as methods and tools for developing, reusing, adapting, integrating such standards, this research is now becoming important and timely. We explore this within the context of the OpenScout project, which is building a federation of repositories with content in the areas of business and management. Thus this study is limited to metadata standards for competencies in the business and management fields, but it is aimed that the lessons from this domain can transfer to other fields and will inform the wider debate on the development and use of such standards. The paper revisits a set of standards for competence descriptions and provides recommendations as to which standard would suit better the nature of the repository, the requirements of stakeholders, and the Open Content resources. In particular, the paper proposes an adaptation and extension of the IEEE-RCD model, employing an application profiling approach, and taking into account the granularity of the European Qualifications Framework and the requirements of Open Content resources.OpenScout project (Contract no.: 428016, “Skill based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training”

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications