USING MULTILINGUAL ANALYTICS TO EXPLORE THE USAGE OF A LEARNING PORTAL IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Learning analytics is a domain constantly evolving throughout the last years, due to the acknowledgement of its importance. Learning analytics may be applied in a variety of different cases but their role in understanding the multilingual requirements of users of learning portals is of an outstanding significance. As the adaptation of existing portals in multilingual environments is a cost and time-consuming aspect of the development of a portal, the outcomes of learning analytics may provide the requirements on which further multilingual services of a portal will be built, ensuring their efficiency. This paper aims to identify and interpret the behavior of users from developing countries in a multilingual learning portal using the log files of the portal by applying the methodology defined in a previous work by Stoitsis et al. (2012). The paper also aims to identify the aspects which should be further studied by future related works, by focusing on specific regions and countries, which exhibit special interest for further adaptation of the portal to additional multilingual environments

Towards Linked Agricultural MetaData: Directions of the agINFRA Project

The agINFRA project focuses on the production of interoperable data in agriculture, starting from the vocabularies and KOS used to classify and an-notate them. In this paper we report on our first steps in the direction of con-tributing to a LOD of agricultural data. In particular we look at germplasm data and soil data, which are still widely missing from the LOD landscape, seeming-ly because information managers in this field are still not very familiar with LOD practices. This is why this paper also recaps the basics of LOD publishing, which will be applied in the agINFRA project

Building blocks for a data infrastructure and services to empower agricultural research communities

The agINFRA project aims to provide the agricultural research communities with e-infrastructure and services for open data access, sharing and re-use. This paper introduces the project’s objectives and data principles, presents the data resources that are covered, and illustrates agINFRA services with examples from the area of agricultural statistics. Finally, it summarises how agricultural research institutions and other stakeholders can participate in, and benefit from, the project

Green education using open educational resources (OER): setting up a green OER repository

A wealth of open educational resources (OER) focused on green topics is currently available through a variety of sources, including learning portals, digital repositories and web sites. However, in most cases these resources are not easily accessible and retrievable, while additional issues further complicate this issue. This paper presents an overview of a number of portals hosting OER, as well as a number of “green” thematic portals that provide access to green OER. It also discusses the case of a new collection that aims to support and populate existing green collections and learning portals respectively, providing information on aspects such as quality assurance/collection and curation policies, workflow and tools for both the content and metadata records that apply to the collection. Two case studies of the integration of this new collection to existing learning portals are also presented.The work presented in this paper has been funded with support by the European Commission, and more specifically the project “Open Discovery Space: A socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adoption of eLearning resources” of the CIP-ICT-PSP Programme (Project Number 297229)

Online Web portal of competence-based training opportunities for Organic Agriculture

A number of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools such as web portals, learning portals and course management platforms have been developed and used in order to support EU-funded research and training projects in the area of Organic Agriculture (OA). This tools transfer the technological infrastructure needed in order to facilitate specific tasks, such as the organization of educational, research and information content, like the competences, learning opportunities, certificates and vocational opportunities. This paper presents the case of the CerOrganic Web portal (http://portal.cerorganic.eu), which is used for providing access to resources related to vocational education and training in the context of OA

agINFRA: a research data hub for agriculture, food and the environment [v2; ref status: indexed, http://f1000r.es/5hk]

The agINFRA project (www.aginfra.eu) was a European Commission funded project under the 7th Framework Programme that aimed to introduce agricultural scientific communities to the vision of open and participatory data-intensive science. agINFRA has now evolved into the European hub for data-powered research on agriculture, food and the environment, serving the research community through multiple roles. Working on enhancing the interoperability between heterogeneous data sources, the agINFRA project has left a set of grid- and cloud- based services that can be reused by future initiatives and adopted by existing ones, in order to facilitate the dissemination of agricultural research, educational and other types of data. On top of that, agINFRA provided a set of domain-specific recommendations for the publication of agri-food research outcomes. This paper discusses the concept of the agINFRA project and presents its major outcomes, as adopted by existing initiatives activated in the context of agricultural research and education

CAPSELLA D2.1 Dissemination, awareness raising and exploitation plan

<p>Dissemination and Communication strategy, exploitation plan</p

Exposing vocabularies for soil as Linked Open Data

Standards to describe soil properties are well established, with many ISO specifications and a few international thesauri available for specific applications. Besides, in recent years, the European directive on ‘‘Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)” has brought together most of the existing standards into a well defined model. However, the adoption of these standards so far has not reached the level of semantic interoperability, defined in the paper, which would facilitate the building of data services that reuse and combine data from different sources. This paper reviews standards for describing soil data and reports on the work done within the EC funded agINFRA project to apply Linked Data technologies to existing standards and data in order to improve the interoperability of soil datasets. The main result of this work is twofold. First, an RDF vocabulary for soil concepts based on the UML INSPIRE model was published. Second, a KOS (Knowledge Organization System) for soil data was published and mapped to existing relevant KOS, based on the analysis of the SISI database of the CREA of Italy. This work also has a methodological value, in that it proposes and applies a methodology to standardize metadata used in local scientific databases, a very common situation in the scientific domain.Finally, this work aims at contributing towards a wider adoption of the INSPIRE directive, by providing an RDF version of it

Innovation in the teaching of sustainable development in Europe: the case of ISLE Erasmus Network

Sustainable Development (SD) is one of the most widely used terms during the last years. It is a multidisciplinary concept, which applies mostly to life sciences but is not limited to them. Even though the short survey conducted by the authors revealed that there are only a few cases of Higher Educational Institutes (HEIs) around Europe that provide programs dedicated to SD, it is obvious that there is a constant raise in the need for implementing courses related to SD in existing programs. This paper discusses the case study of I.S.L.E., an Erasmus Academic Network, which aims to use the existing knowledge and tools in the context of teaching sustainable development topics in Universities and HEIs around Europe as a basis, and elaborate further by introducing an innovative approach towards the improvement of teaching SD in HEIs, based on the current needs as they are identified by the actions of the Network.The work presented in this paper has been funded with support by the European Commission, and more specifically the Erasmus Academic Network “I.S.L.E network: Innovation in the teaching of Sustainable Development in Life sciences in Europe” (14194177267-LLP-1-2010-1-FR-ERASMUSENWA) of the Erasmus Programme