Teaching the principles of the Semantic Web, Linked Data and Controlled Vocabularies is not only about presenting the underlying ideas and concepts in theory but also a matter of discussing practical examples and having experiences with concrete tools and demos.
Just recently Bernhard Haslhofer, teaching at Web Information Systems at Cornell Information Science, confirmed this apporach by saying ““DBpedia and all the other existing Linked Data projects and tools that came up in recent years really help in explaining and illustrating how things work”.
Read the full interview with Dr. Haslhofer at “The Semantic Puzzle”.
It was also a pleasure for us to provide a PoolParty demo server to more than twenty students from Cornell University who were building SKOS vocabularies experimenting with PoolParty´s linked data capabilities.
Here is some feedback we received (which made us very happy and helped us a lot to further improve our tools):
- “It’s really easy to use and, aside from the linking to outside data issues, I liked it a lot.”
- “I liked the tool very much, after the example that professor Haslhofer showed in class I was able to do my homework without checking any other resources on how to use poolparty. It is a great tool for easily performing work that would otherwise be quite tedious.”
- “I like the design and the name (didn’t figure the why of it, but it’s definitely fun)”
- “Poolparty made it very simple to generate code that would have taken a lot time to manually write otherwise. I found it easy to use but only after Professor Haslhofer taught us how to use it. Linking to DBpedia data was a bit confusing. Otherwise, great tool.”
- “It would be a good idea to provide a ‘simple’ and an ‘advanced’ view”
If you are interested in using PoolParty for educational purposes, please take a look at our Academic & Educational License Program.
