This document discusses the development of a social-semantic search engine called Oer-OntoSearch to find open educational resources (OERs). The search engine combines semantic web and social web approaches by semantically encoding OER metadata and integrating user contributions. It was implemented with features like keyword search, results filtering, and presentation of results in HTML and RDF formats. An initial evaluation found that the search engine was able to answer many questions by searching the semantic metadata. Future work will focus on further integrating social and semantic technologies to improve OER search capabilities.

1. 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011 Finding OERs with Social-Semantic Search {N. Piedra, J. Chicaiza, J. López}1 , E. Tovar2 and O. M Bonastre3 1(Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja; Ecuador) 2(PolitechnicUniversity of Madrid, Spain) 3(Miguel Hernández University, Spain)

2. Open EducationalResources Teaching, learning, and research digital resources and tools, available on the public domain or that have been released under an intellectual property license, that is, permit their free use, re-use or re-purposing by others 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

3. 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

4. Whymergethesetwo Web visions? “Social and Semantic Web are twoapproachescomplementary and eachfield can and mustdrawfromtheotherstrengths” (Ankolekar et al., 2008) 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

5. Synergy between social & semantic web ecosystemofdata ecosystem of participation 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

6. Social-Semantic Technologies drivento OER searcher Thereis a needforcountingwithsemanticmetadata in thedescription of theOERs, i.e., semantic search engine to find accurate results and annotate educational resources 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

7. Somewaystofindopen educationalresources DiscoverEd CoursewareWatchdog 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

8. Oer-OntoSearch A searcherbasedonmetadata of Open EducationalResources and usercontributions 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

9. Whyisneccesary a vertical searchengineforOERs? General search engines which are based on horizontal search, do not know the context Development and usage of vertical search engines could be the option to find more accurate results, thus: specialized search (to find out and retrieve only educational content) filtering of content (to focus the target audience and its preferences), and, the possibility to choose the most key educational resources provider. 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

10. Whyisneccesary a vertical searchengineforOERs? By means of metadata enrichment and logic inference, OER consumers will get more precise results from general search engines. At the moment of determining the relationship between the open resources, social annotations, RDF graphs and expert's recommendations, the system itself will be in charge of recommending action paths for information seekers 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

11. Thechallenges Information about open educational content is maintained in heterogeneous sites/repositories Different metadata schemas are used for describe educational material 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

12. Thechallenges Apart from its heterogeneous nature, another important feature of the OER domain is that the content offered on the web sites continuously undergoes changes. The RDF store change to reflect additions of new OER 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

13. Theimplementationprocess 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

14. Adquisition http://ocw.mit.edu http://ocw.utpl.edu.ec 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

15. Encoding For representing the semantic metadata of OER We use the OER-CC ontology, which has been designed to support the OER search based on Semantic-Social Web technologies. For Ensuring Metadata Quality of the Semantic Metadata Automatic methods to extract and clean metadata 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

16. Storage 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

17. Implementation Implemented features for OER-Onto search: It searches for keywords (simple and advanced) It provides options for results filtering It also provides descriptions in many languages (if multilingual descriptions of metadata were specified) The presentation of results is made in HTML and RDF formats, what it makes easier the communication with human and machine agents Support for search refinement, i.e., it provides tag cloud and RDF Graph of related OER 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

18. 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011 Tier Layers of the Search Engine Prototype

19. Search Interface 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

20. InitialEvaluation To check the supported functionalities, we have made an experimental evaluation with educators, students, and self-learners from Computer Science School of UTPL 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

21. 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

22. Discussion Queries about information that exist in metadata. Good results. The proposed searcher was able to answer a high number of the questions despite its simplicity. 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

23. FutureworkandConclusions Currently, we are working to implement other supporting components, such as design of an improvement metric system Enhanced OER search to continue integrating social and semantic web technologies Final Thoughts: When having semantically described resources and offering the results of a search in RDF format, the authors think it will contribute to create a Web of Data –Linked Data-for Open Educational Resources. In this way, different human and software agents will be able to communicate among them 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

24. References Ankolekar, A., Krötzsch, M., Tran, T., andVrandecic, D. “Thetwo cultures: Mashing up Web 2.0 andtheSemantic Web”. Journal of Web Semantics, Elsiver, 6 (1), 2008, 70-75 Gruber, T. “CollectiveKnowledge Systems: Wherethe Social Web meetstheSemantic Web”, Journal of Web Semantics, 6 (1), 2008, pp. 4-13. Heath, T. “Information-seekingonthewebwithtrusted social networks: fromtheorytosystems”. PhDthesis, The Open University, 2008 López, C., García, F. J. “OntologiesappliedtoLearningObjectsRepositoriesforeducationalenvironments in theSemantic Web”. m-ICTE, 2005 Piedra, N. Chicaiza, J. López, J. Martínez, O. Tovar, M. “Anapproachfordescriptionof Open EducationalResourcesbasedonsemantictechnologies”, Proceedingson EDUCON 2010, IEEE, 2010, 1111 -1119 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011

25. Acknowledgements This work has been supported by e-Madrid Project, S2009/TIC-1650, which promotes research and development of technologies to support learning (Technology-Enhanced Learning) 2nd Annual Global Engineering Educational Conference IEEEEducon 2011, Amman, Jordan 4-6 April 2011