Title: Social data interoperability in educational repositories and federations

Authors: Enayat Rajabi; Wolfgang Greller; Katja Niemann; Kostas Kastrantas; Salvador Sanchez-Alonso

Addresses: Information Engineering Research Unit, University of Alcala, Edificio Politecnico, Ctra de Meco s.n., Alcala de Henares, Spain ' Open University of the Netherlands, Valkenburgerweg 177, Heerlen, The Netherlands ' Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, Schloss Birlinghoven, 53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany ' Agro-Know Technologies, Athens, Greece ' Information Engineering Research Unit, University of Alcala, Edificio Politecnico, Ctra de Meco s.n., Alcala de Henares, Spain

Abstract: Several standard metadata notations exist for content items (e.g., IEEE LOM) or persons (e.g., HR-XML). Additionally, a number of classes of metadata such as competence metadata, social metadata, etc. exist in ranges from strict vocabularies to folksonomies. For social metadata, however, several diverse schemata have been proposed, but no commonly agreed standard is available that describes the variety of interactions provided in socially powered platforms. In this paper, we propose a social metadata schema for repository federations containing educational resources (ER) which allows them to expose social data so they can be harvested and used by a variety of service providers. We base this schema on the analysis carried out in the context of the Open Discovery Space project, an EU funded initiative, which harvests information in the form of social metadata and encapsulates the user experience from several content providers' platforms and studies several solutions to their integration.

Keywords: social data; social metadata; learning object repositories; data harvesting; educational resources; repository federations; learning objects.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2013.056606

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2013 Vol.8 No.2, pp.169 - 178

Received: 27 Dec 2012
Accepted: 08 May 2013
Published online: 14 Oct 2014 *

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