Providing accurate and high-quality course information, resulting in a better informed student, is a strategic driver for the University of West London and we have committed some investment in the area. Furthermore, because of the increase in the financial commitment that a university student has to make, their decision on choice of university (if any) needs to be based on good and personalised information regarding the course and potential careers. The aim of this project is to provide students with improved personalised course information that will help them make their informed choice. The aim will be achieved by the following objectives:
Objective 1: Exposing course information in XCRI-CAP format and linked data. The use of semantic web technology to publish course data offerings is expected to provide a more efficient discovery of courses to match the background, objectives and interests of the prospective student. Exposing course data as linked data and by using SPARQL endpoints will enable the standard course data (published in XCRI_CAP and RDF) to be linked to both internal and external resources.
Objective 2: Reengineer “the new course/course offering advertising” processes to allow more automation. The automation will contribute to both the efficiency improvement of the processes and also improve the integrity of the data. The objective is to reengineer the process around providing online forms for the flow of the course information between the different activities in the processes.
Objective 3: Integrate linked data to the institution processes; the aim is to implement a sustainable approach to publish institutional data in linked data format.
Objective 4: build a course information explorer web application; the application will take advantage of the semantic connections embedded in the course data, to provide prospective students with a platform that allows them to match course information to their personal interests.
Objective 5: To disseminate and evaluate the value of the use of linked data in supporting higher education institutions.
Objective 6: To use EA to capture “what is happening” in the enterprise’s activities, processes, capabilities, systems and components, information resource and technologies related to the enterprise missions and goals regarding course information. The objective is to build an As-is model of the institution with the focus on the provision of course data related information. EA will help us review the institution processes, systems and application with the focus on implementing the institutional change. The project will also adopt an EA approach to propose a solution model for publishing semantic data. This will include the different viewpoints; i.e. the business processes, the information models (and the interaction with the institution and external systems), design and development of policies and guidelines needed to expose course data as linked data and how to integrate linked data in sustainable ways.