LUCERO (Linking University Content for Education and Research Online) is a new 1 year JISC-funded project at the Open University. Led by KMi, LUCERO (which means ‘Bright Star’ in Spanish) is a collaboration with the Faculty of Arts and the Open University Library, working in partnership with many other parts of the OU, in order to apply linked data technologies and principles to education and research practices.

To realise this ambitious goal, LUCERO will have to create a new technical infrastructure to store, give access, manipulate and, of course, link data from several institutional repositories (such as Open Research Online, the library catalogue and staff databases).
A major goal is to develop the practice and processes to create expose research and educational information as part of the Web of Data. Knowing which sources can be exposed under which conditions and at what cost is currently a problem faced by any organization wishing to follow the linked open data route. The goal of LUCERO is to generate reusable experience based on making linked University data happen at the OU.

Moreover, LUCERO is not only about exposing data for others to use and explore. One of the major objectives of the project is to concretely demonstrate the benefits of linked data in a University environment, especially to researchers and students. The project works in direct collaboration with six research projects from the Faculty of Arts, which are producing data in various forms. Exposing this data and linking it to both institutional sources and external datasets should make such research results richer and more accessible. As part of the project, we will develop a set of applications showing how students and researchers can take benefit from such enhanced data, to explore the underlying information sources and possibly discover unexpected connections.

For more information about the project go to the project blog, which will be updated regularly with the progress of the project.