The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) is an open specification for the representation of educational expectations. The ASN specification provides for:
- the text of an educational expectation;
- rich metadata describing that expectation and its context; and
- a description of relationships between the expectation being described and other related expectations.
ASN globally unique identifiers are in the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) based on the HTTP protocol. ASN URI's can be resolved by both humans and machines over the web. The ASN:US repository of learning outcomes is the largest on the Semantic Web with over 4.4 million RDF triples and growing each day. The ASN open framework is also in use in Australia (ASN:AU).
The ASN is powered by these Semantic Web technologies:
Just thought we'd share some useful SPARQL queries that we use from time to time.
- Find out if an ASN URI (http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/S102511A) comes from a Published Standards Document:
ASK
{
<http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/S102511A> dcterms:isPartOf ?standardsDocument.
?standardsDocument asn:publicationStatus <http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNPublicationStatus/Published>.
}
SPARQL response in HTML: http://tinyurl.com/7fpq4hc
- Return to me just the state codes and corresponding ASN URI's for a particular ASN Standards Document (http://asn.jesandco.org/resources/D2362333):
SELECT DISTINCT ?statementNotation ?asnURI WHERE
{
We fixed a bug in the ASN RDF/JSON where invalid JSON was produced if a literal value ended with a quotation mark (").
Example of previous bug:
{"value":"Ends with a quote/}
now correctly generates as:
{"value":"Ends with a quote/""}.
Also, URI values in the RDF/JSON are no longer string escaped. Previously looked like:
{ "value" : "http:\/\/purl.org\/ASN\/schema\/core\/StandardDocument", "type" : "uri" }
now look like:
{ "value" : "http://purl.org/ASN/schema/core/StandardDocument", "type" : "uri" }
The launch of the new Gateway to 21st Century Skills website uses ASN standards data to help teachers discover resources that have been correlated to various standards, including the Common Core. The Gateway uses Yahoo's YUI framework to display ASN standards. Gateway users can browse the standards in a collapisble tree view and find resources that have been correlated to a specific standard. See a screenshot of the interface here.
You can try it out (with a free Gateway account) by going to: http://www.thegateway.org/search-by-standard.
ASN data was in the spotlight this week with the launch of the Learning Registry. The Learning Registry is a joint effort of the Department of Education and the Department of Defense, with support of the White House and numerous federal agencies, non-profit organizations, international organizations and private companies. The Learning Registry is creating a set of technical protocols as a platform for innovation by content authors and aggregators. Applications built to harness the power of harvesting and analyzing the Learning Registry data will allow educators to quickly find content specific to their unique needs.
ASN URI correlations were freely pushed out into the Learning Registry by both Agilix and NSDL to enhance resource discovery by standards. Steve Midgley (Deputy Director, Office of Educational Technology, U.S. Department of Education) highlighted some of these resources during his presentation through the use of a Google Chrome Extension.
For more information about this event including Steve Midgley's presentation see: http://www.learningregistry.org/news
For more information about JES & Co.'s involvement with the Learning Registry see: http://www.learningregistry.org/community/jesandco
