implement Linked Data as a procedure prior to
publication of data, bringing it into a real context.
3 MOTIVATION AND GOALS
The University of La Laguna is a large-scale public
higher education institution. It currently involves
more than 26,000 people including students,
teachers and administration staff, distributed
between 25 centres, 60 departments and other areas.
There are also close links with private entities
(companies, foundations and institutes) and public
institutions such as the local island administration
Cabildo de Tenerife, City Councils and the
Government of the Canary Islands.
The organizational structure is decentralized, and
many functions are delegated to each of the
departments, centres and services. This fact has a
special relevance to this work, as we have had to
study the functions of the principal organizational
units in depth. Each unit works almost
independently, each one takes responsibility for
handling administrative processes that have been
delegated to them, collecting and maintaining the
information necessary to operate (accounting,
academic administration, libraries, ITC centres,
etc.).
With respect to this work, there are many
information systems that offer support to the
university as a whole. Financial Management and
Academic Management are among the main ones
that are found. The first system takes care of the
management of the administration staff and the
teaching staff; while the second is concerned with
the enrolment processes and everything related to
teaching. Both aggregate a large quantity of data and
are more or less controlled forming a fairly
homogenous architecture. They use the same group
of software development technologies, the same
database management system, and, most relevant,
they are under the responsibility of the same IT
department. Although there is a certain homogeneity
between these systems, extracting information
across both systems continues to be a complex and
costly task.
Apart from larger, older systems, there are
smaller, independent systems, of great value to the
institution. These have appeared over time according
to the needs of services or departments. Examples of
these systems are: the research service, the
directories of the institution´s staff, quality control,
diaries and events, etc. These are usually controlled
by different areas and each one can have different
software.
It is at this point that this work begins to have
meaning. There are many cases where management,
statistical or other similar information is requested
from other institutions within the university itself.
Most of these systems work independently from one
another, and when it is necessary to consult
information from two or more sources, it is
necessary to establish connections between the
different systems. Due to the complexity and
internal structure of each system, staff have to make
a particularly strenuous effort to obtain the data.
The main motivation to work in this environment
and to offer a practical solution to these problems
based on Linked Data is, on the one hand, the
existence of the real problem of access to different
sources of data, and on the other, that the
university´s staff is quite able to accept new
proposals and finally, the existence of a real and
concrete problem with which to apply Linked Data
methods and techniques (for the re-use of
ontologies, generation of RDF links, publication of
data and consumption of published data).
The key challenge is to offer the university a
solution for offering information obtained from a
variety of sources, without modifying the current
systems, as many are legacy systems and are so
assimilated within the institution that a change to
them could cause chaos. This is the solution that we
present below.
4 LINKED DATA PROCESS
The process of linking data from the different
information systems has followed an iterative and
incremental methodology (Suárez de Figueroa
Baonza, 2010). This process has allowed us to
obtain valuable results from the first iterations and
refine them continuously. As a consequence, the
Linked Data process is provided with the necessary
flexibility to tackle the changes related to the
requirements in any phase of the process.
The working methodology comprises six
differentiated phases inspired by methodologies
commonly used for the publication of Linked Data
(Poveda-Villalón, 2012); (Corcho et al., 2013);
(Fernández-López, 1997); (Atemezing et al., 2012)
and adapted to the needs of the particular working
environment. These phases are divided between:
specification of data to be published, data modelling,
generation of data in RDF, publication, linking and
exploitation.
Given the peculiarities of linking data in our
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