Integrating Semantic Web Technologies in the Architecture of BBC Knowledge & Learning Beta Online Pages

The BBC has understood the value of online learning from the early stages of the web, and has provided rich educational material to those wanting to learn. An example of this is the BBC Bitesize website, which started back in 1998 and is a popular formal education resource. In the formal learning space the BBC has a number of sites: the already mentioned Bitesize, Skillswise and Class Clips amongst others. There are tens of thousands of content items across these sites, with each site having different mechanisms for publishing, discovering and describing the content it serves. To provide a coherent learning experience to users, a model for describing content in the context of the UK national curricula was developed. This model provided the foundation for building the new Knowledge & Learning beta website, presenting learning resources in the context of the UK national curricula in a consistent way. In addition, it allows for consistent reflection of changes in the national curricula throughout the product. Designing the architecture of such a system is a challenging task. Each of the existing sites have similar yet different ways of describing and navigating through their content. In addition, the existing learning sites do not have a single content description model that could be reused in the beta site. Having a flexible structure in the back-end that can reflect the national curriculum and that can be used for consistently describing and organising learning resources is a key feature of the architecture. We are going to present the architecture behind the Knowledge & Learning Beta site and we focus on the curriculum ontology, which is central to the architecture. We show how it is used to describe and organise learning resources, how it supports navigation and how it is aligned with semantic markup vocabularies for better precision in search. We will also present some of the challenges we faced and discuss future work.