Totuba has collected an impressive amount of data about courses in China, for Chinese (Mandarin), Business Management and others. It is not just a copy of some data found in the Web, but has been carefully selected and processed to allow our users to compare courses and quickly find the one course that meets their requirements.

We now are exploring whether/how this data and our services can profit from making the data available to third-parties. It is widely argued that exposing data/services to the world actually increases its value and is of benefit for the providing party. Twitter is often used as an example, as their interface allows third-party applications to provide alternative interfaces, but also to build new kinds of applications on top of Twitter.

Instead of starting with a Web 2.0 style interface with our own function names that interested developers have to become accustomed to, we decide to first take the Semantic Web/Web of Data approach. This means that we will build on top of the standards developed by the W3C and have a RDF representation of our data with a SPARQL access to query and retrieve it. This way we will implement according to a standard way to publish our data in the Web, just like HTML is a standard way to publish content in the Web.

We also want to link our data to other data already out there. So, instead of having our own entity for a city, e.g, “Shanghai”, we will reuse entities already out there, for instance in DBPedia, a semantic version of Wikipedia. What is the advantage? Well, by reusing existing entities, people using our data will immediately know what we are talking about, e.g., Shanghai, the city in China, or about the Master of Business and Management. They can identify that their data talks about the same thing, for instance that the content of their book is also relevant for a Master of Business and Management. They can combine their and our data and come up with new applications. So can we.

Well, that is the theory. We are keen to learn what comes out of it. But first we have to transform our data in Linked Data. More about that in one of the next posts.