Linked Data

Tim Berners-Lee’s passionate exposition on Ted Talks on linked data starts with his expression of frustration with silos of content and proprietary nature of formats 20 years back when he first started working on the idea of creating a virtual repository of documents accessible anywhere. He thinks that this time around linked data (see semantic web) is a solution around a similar frustration, this time with data. Will it be as revolutionary as the World Wide Web?

For teaching and learning, perhaps it may offer some completely new analytics. For example, who has the same or closest matching initial conditions for learning as I do when I am about to learn something new and which resources did he or she use to learn? Who teaches the way I do? Which teacher would best suit my learning preferences? If this kind of information – curricula, learner profiles, teaching methods – all could be made widely available as a linked data resource, imagine the newer applications that could be made available on the basis of these new analytics!