ASN News
We have added a new Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) resolver to all our schemes. This makes it easier to browse and navigate through our various vocabularies like Education Level or Jurisdiction in a web browser. You can access the RDF for individual concepts by adding the ".rdf" file extension to any concept URI, or access the scheme's entire RDF file by visiting its URI.
Some examples:
ASN Jurisdiction - USA:
http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNJurisdiction/USA
ASN Education Level - Middle School:
http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/MiddleSchool
ASN Indexing Status - Yes (rdf):
http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNIndexingStatus/Yes.rdf
Here is a drop-in replacement JavaScript file for the Ext JS 4.0 Checkbox tree demo that uses our new ASN CORS enabled files* to make cross-domain requests inside of an application.
You can view a running version of the sample code on JSFiddle.
*CORS support may vary between web browsers
We have enabled Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for all our ASN files (manifest and full RDF flavors). This allows web browsers to make requests that would otherwise be forbidden due to the same origin policy. For now, if you request _full or _manifest you receive a 303 redirect to where those files are stored in the cloud and you must use that URL for the request.
For example, you can now easily fetch an ASN manifest file directly with jQuery + AJAX:
Not all legacy web browsers support CORS so make sure to check prior to implementing.
We are proud to release ASN Search - a high throughput, low latency search API powered by the ASN open source dataset. This new web service enables free-text and faceted search with the ability to search and sort learning outcomes using any of the fields in the ASN metadata schema. We have taken the built-in power of ASN's "graph of learning outcomes" and wrapped it with an easy to use RESTful JSON API. ASN Search can integrate into any website or application that requires learning outcomes for meta-tagging, content correlation and/or data analysis. Try it out.
The ASN is built on Linked Data principles i.e. using the Web to connect related data not previously linked. So naturally, we wanted to start connecting ASN learning outcomes to other datasets. We are starting off with the mother of all Linked Open Datasets, DBpedia Wikipedia's linked data counterpart. You will now start seeing semantic tags included in ASN data that tie specific learning outcomes to related people, places and things. For example, a learning outcome discussing a historical person, John F. Kennedy and an event, Cuban Missile Crisis, can now be enriched with additional data about those specific things from around the Semantic Web.
We've included a screenshot (below) of a particular learning outcome that has been semantically tagged with ASN Concept Terms and the result of clicking on a given term. Try it out yourself. We think this adds great value to ASN data and to the applications that consume it.
