Using Linked Data to Annotate and Search Educational Video Resources for Supporting Distance Learning

Multimedia educational resources play an important role in education, particularly for distance learning environments. With the rapid growth of the multimedia web, large numbers of educational video resources are increasingly being created by several different organizations. It is crucial to explore, share, reuse, and link these educational resources for better e-learning experiences. Most of the video resources are currently annotated in an isolated way, which means that they lack semantic connections. Thus, providing the facilities for annotating these video resources is highly demanded. These facilities create the semantic connections among video resources and allow their metadata to be understood globally. Adopting Linked Data technology, this paper introduces a video annotation and browser platform with two online tools: Annomation and SugarTube. Annomation enables users to semantically annotate video resources using vocabularies defined in the Linked Data cloud. SugarTube allows users to browse semantically linked educational video resources with enhanced web information from different online resources. In the prototype development, the platform uses existing video resources for the history courses from the Open University (United Kingdom). The result of the initial development demonstrates the benefits of applying Linked Data technology in the aspects of reusability, scalability, and extensibility. (Contains 12 figures and 17 footnotes.)