Linking a Community Platform to the Linked Open Data Cloud

Linked Data promises access to a vast amount of resources for learners and teachers. Various research projects have focused on providing educational resources as Linked Data. In many of these projects the focus has been on interoperability of metadata and on linking them into the linked data cloud. In this paper we focus on the community aspect. We start from the observation that sharing data is most valuable within communities of practice with common interests and goals, and community members are interested in suitable resources to be used in specific learning scenarios. The community of practice we are focusing on is an English language teaching and learning community, which we have been supporting through the LearnWeb2.0 platform for the last two years. We analyse the requirements of this specific community as a basis to enrich the current collected materials with open educational resources taken from the Linked Data Cloud. To this aim, we performed an interlinking approach in order to enrich the learning resources exposed as RDF (Resource Description Framework) in the LearnWeb2.0 platform with additional information taken from the Web.