Abstract—The european higher education area (EHEA) aims
to create a more comparable, compatible and coherent space of
Higher Education in Europe. After a decade of reforms, most of
the required instruments are already in place, so the next years
are key to complete the implementation and consolidation of the
EHEA. However, data challenges pose a threat to pivotal EHEA
processes such as credit recognition that require institutions to
cooperate and integrate their datasets scattered across diverse
repositories in multiple data formats. Linked Data principles
and practices have the potential to address such difficulties, as
demonstrated with the emergence of a global data space –the
Web of Data. This paper first discusses the benefits of Linked
Data for the emergent EHEA, devising a new set of Linked
Data-driven scenarios that leverage current EHEA processes.
Further, a set of preliminary Linked Data deployments is
examined to assess the advantages and identify the challenges
ahead in the EHEA landscape.
Index Terms—European higher education area (EHEA),
linked data, semantic web, technology-enhanced learning
(TEL).
Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo is with the Department of Informatics,
University of Oslo, Norway (e-mail: guiveg@ifi.uio.no).
Thanassis Tiropanis is with the School of Electronics and Computer
Science, University of Southampton, UK (e-mail: tt2@ecs.soton.ac.uk).
David E. Millard is with the School of Electronics and Computer Science,
University of Southampton, UK (e-mail: dem@ecs.soton.ac.uk).
Cite: Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo, Thanassis Tiropanis, and David E. Millard, "The Opportunity of Linked Data for the European Higher Education Area," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 58-64, 2016.