We-Share: a social annotation application that publishes and retrieves information about educational ICT tools from the Web of Data

This paper presents the design and development of WeShare, a social annotation application that allows educators to search, create and enrich descriptions of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools from the Web of Data. As many others social applications, We-Share allows educators to publish information about the ICT tools they use in their classrooms. Further, We-Share also enables educators to relate tool descriptions to the educational contexts where the tools were employed, thus gathering educationalspecific knowledge about the use of ICT tools. A distinctive feature of We-Share is that it relies on SEEK-AT-WD, a Linked-Data-based infrastructure that keeps updated a collection of thousands of descriptions of educational ICT tools on the Web by periodically gathering data from third parties. Hence, We-Share can make use of the data gathered by SEEK-AT-WD to create an initial collection of tool descriptions that can overcome the cold-start problem that other registries suffer. Further, as SEEK-AT-WD updates the tool descriptions it publishes, this same data will be updated on We-Share. Finally, as the data published on We-Share will be available as Linked Open Data its potential impact is higher and it contributes to the development of an educational Web of Data. All in all, We-Share combines the affordances of social annotation applications, which can gather domain-specific knowledge about educational ICT tools, with the affordances of Linked-Data-based applications, which promote the sharing of data with third parties.