LILE 2016 - Learning & Education with the Web of Data

Building on the previous editions and its growing community, this workshop will provide a forum to discuss approaches making use of Web Data and related technologies, especially Linked Data, for teaching, learning and education. Distance teaching and openly available educational resources on the Web are becoming common practices with public higher education institutions as well as private training organisations realising the benefits of online resources. In addition, informal learning and knowledge exchange are inherent to the online interactions found on the Web, involving for instance, learning and knowledge-centric social networks, such as Bibsonomy, Slideshare or Videolectures, but also general purpose social environments such as LinkedIn, where matters related to skills, competence development or training are central concerns of involved stakeholders. These interactions generate a vast amount of informal knowledge resources of varying granularity as well as indicators for learning and competences, which are currently under-investigated.
On the other hand, the widespread adoption of Linked Data principles as well as the more recent widespread adoption of embedded annotations through schema.org, Microformats and RDFa has led to the availability of vast amounts of semi-structured data which facilitates interpretation and reuse of Web content and data. This includes directly learning-focused schemas and vocabularies (e.g., LRMI, AAISO, BIBO) and datasets, such as the ones gathered by LinkedEducation.org, LinkedUniversities.org and LinkedUp, including data from The Open University (UK), the National Research Council (Italy), or the mEducator ? Linked Educational Resource as well as general purpose knowledge graphs, such as DBpedia, WordNet RDF.
This has led to the creation of an embryonic “Web of Educational Data”, largely focused on sharing semi-structured metadata about resources, but still lacking sufficient recognition of learning-related activities and knowledge resources prevalent in less structured and informal online settings. On the other hand, progress in methods and tools for Entity-centric approaches for analysing and understanding the wealth of data on the Web ? such as entity extraction, linking and retrieval ? have paved the way for the exploration of Web data and knowledge relevant to learning and education. The widespread analysis of both informal and formal learning activities and resources has the potential to fundamentally aid and transform the production, recommendation and consumption of learning services and content. However, widespread take-up of such approaches is still hindered by issues that are both technical as well interdisciplinary. Building on the success of several editions of the LILE workshop (2011-2015), LILE2016 aims at addressing such challenges by providing a forum for researchers and practitioners who make innovative use of Linked Data for educational purposes, and to discuss, exchange and disseminate their work. LILE2016 will also feature an open data competition that will continue the efforts of the LinkedUp Challenge, bringing in the perspective of the AFEL project, a new research and innovation action.