Exploring the Linked University Data with Visualization Tools

University data is typically stored in separate data silos even though the data is implicitly richly related together. Such data has a large and diverse user base, including faculty members, students, industrial partners, alumnis, collaborating universities, and media. In this paper, we demonstrate two tools for understanding and using the contents of linked university data. The first tool, Visualization Playground (VISU), supports querying and visualizing the data for example for illustrating emerging trends in universities (e.g., about publications) and for comparing di↵erences. The second tool, Vocabulary Visualizer (V ), demonstrates the usage of shared vocabularies in the Linked University Data Cloud. It reveals what kinds of data di↵erent universities have published, and what terms are used to describe the contents. Such analysis is a basis for facilitating design of Linked Data applications across university data boundaries. 1 Towards Linked University Data Data production and knowledge publication in universities are traditionally based on separate data silos for di↵erent data types and domains. Such silos include data such as publication information, course and event descriptions, educational materials, web pages and news feeds. University information systems have traditionally been implemented without considering opening the data stored in there and how it could be done. Another big challenge with separated data silos is the wide diversity of data models and practices in use. Linked Open Data (LOD) principles and technologies enable universities to publish their legacy data with shared open standards, and o↵er a variety of approaches for integrating university contents with the existing Web of Data[1]. The promise is that the use of LOD technologies supports academic organizations to be more transparent, comparable, and even more open for new ideas. Linked Universities1 is a collaboration alliance and application scenario where open datasets from universities are published and linked together using the 5-star methodology2. Several universities3 have already published SPARQL endpoints 1 http://linkeduniversities.org