Prof John Domingue

STFC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science

A major obstacle to increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). The creation and maintenance of comprehensive OpenCourseWare (OCW) is tedious, time-consuming and expensive, with the effect, that often courseware employed by teachers, instructors and professors is incomplete, outdated, dull and inaccessible to those with disabilities. By using the open-source SlideWiki platform (available at SlideWiki.org) the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared (i.e. crowdsourced). In a similar way to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows users to: 1. collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner, 2. semi-automatically translate this content into more than 50 different languages and to improve the translations in a collaborative manner and 3. support engagement and social networking of educators and learners around that content.

The Customer wishes to enlist the support of the OU to prepare a limited number of reports that will be used within and by the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum in order to gain a more in-depth understanding of opportunities and issues at stake regarding blockchain technologies

Although there is an abundance of medical educational content available in individual EU academic institutions, this is not widely available or easy to discover and retrieve, due to lack of standardized content sharing mechanisms. The aim of mEducator BPN is to implement and critically evaluate existing standards and reference models in the field of e-learning in order to enable specialized state-of-the-art medical educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared and re-used across European higher academic institutions. Educational content included in mEducator covers and represents the whole range of medical educational content, from traditional instructional teaching to active learning and experiential teaching/studying approaches. It spans the whole range of types, from text to exam sheets, algorithms, teaching files, computer programs (simulators or games) and interactive objects (like virtual patients and electronically traced anatomies, while it covers a variety of topics. mEducator aims to (a) examine to what extent existing standards for the description of educational material can address all the possible types of medical educational material listed above, and make respective recommendations for standards extensions; (b) examine to what extent existing standards for educational material packaging and exchange among learning management systems are adequate to support state-of-the art educational content sharing in medicine and provide respective recommendations for standards extensions; and (c) examine to what extent a recently proposed standard-based reference model for automated educational content discovery, retrieval and sharing can be deployed for medical educational content delivery and sharing and whether extensions are required. As a BNP, mEducator will attempt to compare two contemporary ways of achieving this content sharing, namely, a solution based on Web2.0 technologies, and a solution based on Semantic Web Services. mEducator will work closely with MedBiquitous Europe standardization body to adopt and implement MedBiquitous technology standards for medical and healthcare education in order to make medical content interoperable and shareable across the European Union. For this to succeed, material is re-purposed for multilingual, multicultural use and access. Provision of the material to non-partner institutes is planned with the foreseen (sustainability) aim to invite more institutes in the distributed pool. Last but not least, mEducator will invite students, educators, and health professionals (continuing education) to evaluate its outcomes.

ParkMe combines geographic data and parking space information with user location, social networks and other data sources and third-party services in an application that shows the current availability of parking spaces, making it easier for people to find parking when coming to work or driving into town. In face of the scarcity of authoritative parking space data, the application crowd-sources the collection of parking data to its users. The objective of the ParkMe project is to showcase Semantic Web Service (SWS) technologies—developed in a series of research projects culminating with SOA4All—by building an application that both consumes and produces linked data. ParkMe is a Web and mobile application that ties crowdsourcing with Linked Data and social networks. SOA4All technologies are heavily used to simplify the development of the back-end of the application, and to enable dynamic incorporation of third-party services and data sources.

The goal of SOFI is to complement R&D projects in the area of Internet of Services, Software and Virtualization (Objective 1.2) through specific support activities. SOFI aims to ensure the position of European research as a leader in the definition and realization of the theoretical and technological foundations of the Future Internet of Services, as well as European industry's competitive advantage in the creation of value and new opportunities from the use of Future Internet. SOFI will build upon existing work related to the Service related working groups, most specifically the Future Internet Service Offer WG (FISO), within the Future Internet. The specific objectives of the SOFI proposal are: - Support the organisation of the Future Internet Assembly, and in particular to pursue the activities of and further develop the Future Internet Service Offer. SOFI will lead the work of producing an annual book with results from the Future Internet Assemblies. This approach will be complemented by a world-wide effort to coordinate European Future Internet efforts with corresponding programs in the USA, Japan, and elsewhere, ensuring EU Future Internet initiatives related to software and services are relevant and that European industry and society can be at the helm of the Future Internet. - Support dissemination of the Internet of Services community results as a crucial instrument to strengthen and extend the impact of supported collaborative research projects through the provision of specific dissemination channels, in particular the conference series Future Internet Symposium (FIS) and ServiceWave. SOFI will also help raise awareness among European businesses and public stakeholders of technological solutions enabled through the Internet of Services, and facilitate the steady and systematic adoption of these technologies by participating in relevant events, conferences, tutorials, and information days. - Implement the Future Internet portal and collaboration measures to ensure cohesion and alignment of strategies, objectives and results of projects and initiatives within the Future Internet initiative. In particular, SOFI will collaborate on an improved and regularly updated Future Internet portal, communicating results from the services community and publicizing technical solutions to the research and industry. Also, SOFI will participate in collaboration measures such as a European Vision on the Future Internet Architecture and roadmapping for FP8 research.

Higher education is going through a deep transformation period with technological advancements acting as a multiplicative factor. Starting from campus-based online courses and evolving into massive open online courses (MOOC) where the participants are distributed and course materials are dispersed across the web. On the other hand, there are initiatives like FIRE that building large infrastructures destined to be used for experimental research. The biggest problem they are facing and still not resolved is their widespread use (user penetration) which put their future at risk due to lack of external funding (sustainability). The FORGE project aims at investigating and developing new processes and approaches on introducing FIRE facilities and tools to student education. The rationale behind the FIRE approach is that students are the potential future-internet facilities users: at that future moment having the role of experimenters within a company or an organization, being already familiar with FIRE facilities, they will strive for usage. By investing on students, FORGE believes that this is a path towards FIRE long-term sustainability. To accomplish the above, FORGE wants to exploit the idea of enhancing, integrating and extending existing e-learning approaches with FIRE’s available portfolio for experimentation. To this end, existing MOOC platforms can be enhanced and extended in order to support lab assignments that can be carried out by students remotely and using any infrastructures through FIRE. In addition, professors and other specialized staff may contribute lab material to a common platform that can be accessible by other academic institutes.

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VPH-Share will develop the organisational fabric (the infostructure) and integrate the optimised services to (1) expose and share data and knowledge, (2) jointly develop multiscale models for the composition of new VPH workflows, (3) facilitate collaborations within the VPH community. Four flagship workflows (from @neurIST, euHeart, VPHOP, Virolab) provide existing data, tools and models, engage with the services developed by VPH-Share to drive the development of the infostructure, and pilot its applications. Data sources are usually clinical data from individual patients - medical images and/or biomedical signals - sometimes with population information. The operations range from secure access and storage through annotation, data inference and assimilation, to complex image processing and physics-based mathematical modelling, to data reduction and representation. The project focuses on a key bottleneck – the interface with the wealth of data from medical research infrastructures and from clinical processes. VPH-Share will provide the essential services, as well as the computational infrastructure, for the sharing of clinical and research data and tools, facilitating the construction and operation of new VPH workflows, and collaborations between the members of the VPH community. Evaluating the effectiveness and fitness-for-purpose of the infostructure and developing a thorough exploitation strategy are key activities, creating confidence in the communities. The consortium, through its optimal mix of medical, mathematical, engineering, software & hardware and industrial knowledge and expertise from the EU and internationally, will make this effort a success, delivering to European citizens clinically useful outcomes that will benefit society. The duration of the project is 4 years, its budget is € 14.5M, with an EC contribution of € 10.7M.

Linked Data has established itself as the de facto means for the publication of structured data over the Web, enjoying amazing growth in terms of the number of organizations committing to use its core principles for exposing and interlinking data sets for seamless exchange, integration, and reuse. More and more ICT ventures offer innovative data management services on top of Linked (Open) Data, creating a demand for data practitioners possessing skills and detailed knowledge in this area. Ensuring the availability of such expertise will prove crucial if European businesses are to reap the full benefits of these advanced data management technologies, and the know-how accumulated over the past years by researchers, technology enthusiasts and early adopters in various European Member States. EUCLID will contribute to this goal by providing a comprehensive educational curriculum, supported by multi-modal learning materials and highly visible eLearning distribution channels, tailored to the real needs of data practitioners. Building upon the experience of the consortium accumulated in over 20 Linked Data projects with over 40 companies and public offices in more than 10 countries, complemented by feedback from more than 20 training events, and an in-depth analysis of the community discourse through mailing lists, discussion forums, Twitter, and the blogosphere, the curriculum will focus on techniques and software to integrate, query, and visualize Linked Data, as core areas in which practitioners state to require most assistance. The curriculum will be realized as living learning materials on a community Web site, and will be evaluated, refined, and extended in a webinar series, face-to-face training, and through continuous community feedback and contributions coordinated by a designated community manager. A significant share of the materials will consist of examples referring to real-world data sets and application scenarios, code snippets and demos that developers can run on their machines, as well as best practices and how-tos. In its final form, the curriculum will be delivered as an eBook series distributed via iTunes U, complemented by the materials collected on the community Web site. By providing these key knowledge-transfer components, EUCLID will not only promote the industrial uptake of Linked Data best practices and technologies, but, perhaps more importantly, will contribute to their further development and consolidation and support the sustainability of the community - all essential aspects given the novelty of the field and the rapid pace at which it has recently advanced.