Frequently Asked Questions

  1. How is the Linked Data Competency Index used in practice? In the LD4PE Project, the index had two primary uses. It provided a overview of the Linked Data field that teachers and learners could use to design university courses, training workshops, or self-directed learning programs. It also provided a set of URIs, for use in metadata, for tagging tutorial resources in terms of topics or competencies covered.

  2. Why are the competencies not numbered for easy reference? The competency index will evolve over time. Topics, competencies, or benchmarks could, in principle, be added anywhere in the index, which would change the numbers of any sequential numbering system. Conceivably, we could decide to issue occasional stable releases. In this case, the Python script for building the Markdown document might then be modified to calculate item numbers on the model of x (clusters), x.x (topics), x.x.x (competencies), x.x.x.x (benchmarks). Moving to numbered releases would also help translators of the index (see the translation in Chinese. If you feel strongly about this issue, please feel free to open an issue in the Github issue tracker.

  3. Are the URIs for competencies covered by the DCMI Namespace Policy? The DCMI Namespace Policy lists several namespaces for which the organization makes a long-term commitment to their persistence and semantic stability. Currently, all of those namespaces are managed under the purl.org resolver service, where DCMI administers its own PURL subdomain. From the start of the LD4PE Project, the URIs for topics and competencies in the Linked Data Competency Index have been coined and managed under the Achievement Standards Network. The topic "Identity in RDF", for example, is identified with the URI http://asn.desire2learn.com/resources/S2696001. In order to extend its namespace policy to cover such URIs, DCMI would need to better understand ASN's policies with regard to persistence or, possibly, consider coining dublincore.org or PURL URIs under its own control. More fundamentally, we should ask ourselves how important is it that the things in the index have persistent identity and stable semantics? The answer should depend to an extent on how the competency index is used in practice. We might start by distinguishing between topics (and topic clusters), which change infrequently and can be used in metadata as broad subject headings, and competencies (and benchmarks), which will be coined and superseded more quickly as technology evolves. In the LD4PE Project, competency URIs were used to tag tutorial resources for retrieval by competency. Many of these materials, such as blog postings, will become superseded or unavailable. Do the competencies used as their tags really need to be more persistent than the described resources themselves? If you feel strongly about this issue, please feel free to open an issue in the Github issue tracker.