Automatic Retrieval of Educational ICT Tool Descriptions from the Web of Data

Linked Data is a methodology to publish data on the Web that facilitates the federation of data sources. Following this methodology, a huge quantity of data is being published on the Web of Data, but very little is currently consumed by educational applications. This paper proposes to overcome this situation by relating educational vocabularies to the ones already used on the Web of Data. This way, educational applications can take advantage of the data published on the Web even if such data was not published for educational purposes. As a case study, the vocabulary used by an educational tool search system, called Ontoolsearch, is related to ICT tool descriptions published by DBpedia and Factforge. Evaluation results show that 2905 tool descriptions can be retrieved from the Web of Data to be consumed by Ontoolsearch. In addition, most of these descriptions have a similar quality to the ones manually published by an educational tool expert.