The Open University (OU) is the world leader in distance teaching and the largest university in the UK. It is also well known as the UK’s most innovative and high-impact concept in higher education. Since its charter was granted in 1969, it has re-shaped the notion of quality distance learning, evolving to what the OU now calls Supported Open Learning in recognition of the extensive and flexible support offered to its 220,000 currently registered students through a vast human network of 7,400 Associate Lecturers throughout the UK and Europe.

Over 180,000 students are now regularly online, using discourse environments to work with their tutors and peers or interacting with increasing amounts of custom-developed primary and support resources via the Web and streaming media.

Knowledge Media Institute

The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 in recognition of the need for the OU to be at the forefront of research and development in a convergence of areas that impacted on the OU’s very nature. Approximately 70 researchers, technologists and designers work in the fields of the semantic web and knowledge services, knowledge management, social software, new media systems, narrative hypermedia, and multimedia and information systems.

Our contribution to the Semantic Web arises largely from a core of work in the knowledge modelling area: capturing and representing human problem solving, thinking, and reasoning skills for use by the software agents of the future. We have developed a variety of tools and technologies, based around our knowledge modelling language OCML, to support applications that solve intensive knowledge dependent problems. We were a part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) WebOnt working group that created the semantic web language OWL, and are currently taking a leading role in the OASIS standardisation committee for Semantic Execution Environments.

Dr. John Domingue, the Deputy Director of the Knowledge Media Institute, and the OU PI for Service Web 3.0 was the Scientific Director for the DIP project (FP6 – 507483) an Integrated Project on Semantic Web services which finished in December, 2006. Current Semantic Web Service projects at the OU include:

• SUPER (FP6-026850) – which combines Semantic Web service and business process modelling technologies to support business process management,
• LUISA (FP6-027149) – which will create a new paradigm for eLearning based on Semantic Web services, and
• Living Human Digital Library (FP6 026932) – which uses Semantic Web services to create a complete in-silico model of the human musclo-skeletal system by combining dispersed computational models.

Moreover the OU is coordinating NeOn (FP6 027595) which aims to dramatically improve the support for ontology engineering by developing both a reference architecture and a concrete toolkit supporting the ontology engineering lifecycle