Consuming and producing linked open data: the case of OpenCourseWare

Purpose The aim of this paper is to present an initiative of application of the Linked Data principles to promote data interoperability between heterogeneous OpenCourseWare (OCW) repositories and to enhance the search and discovery of contents created and shared by the universities. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a case study of how Linked Data technologies can be applied for the enhancement of open learning contents. Findings Results presented under the umbrella of OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) and OCW-Universia consortium, as the integration and access to content from different repositories OCW and the development of a query method to access these data, reveal that Linked Data would offer a solution to filter and select semantically those open educational contents, and automatically are linked to the Linked Open Data Cloud.