Areal data have been used to good effect in a wide range of sociological research. One of the most persistent problems associated with this type of data, however, is the need to combine data sets with incongruous boundaries. To help address this problem, we introduce a new method for identifying common geographies. We show that identifying common…

Data-informed instructional methods offer tremendous promise for increasing the effectiveness of teaching, learning, and schooling. Yet-to-be-developed data science approaches have the potential to dramatically advance instruction for every student and to enhance learning for people of all ages. Next steps that emerged from a recent National…

In a wide range of fields, professional practice is being transformed by the increasing influence of digital analytics: the massive volumes of big data, and software algorithms that are collecting, comparing and calculating that data to make predictions and even decisions. Researchers in a number of social sciences have been calling attention to…

Introduction: In the big data age, we have to deal with a tremendous amount of information, which can be collected from various types of sources. For information search systems such as Web search engines or online digital libraries, the collection of documents becomes larger and larger. For some queries, an information search system needs to…

Purpose: DBpedia extracts structured information from Wikipedia, interlinks it with other knowledge bases and freely publishes the results on the web using Linked Data and SPARQL. However, the DBpedia release process is heavyweight and releases are sometimes based on several months old data. DBpedia-Live solves this problem by providing a live…

The latest data alert: By 2020, the amount of data generated daily will reach 40 zettabytes, or roughly 5,247 gigabytes for every person on earth. That's one of the findings in a new report published by IT industry analysts at IDC. The study casts doubt on the ability to capture the value of all this data, especially since schools barely tapped…

In the case of higher education, the hills are more like mountains of data that "we're accumulating at a ferocious rate," according to Gerry McCartney, CIO of Purdue University (Indiana). "Every higher education institution has this data, but it just sits there like gold in the ground," complains McCartney. Big Data and the new tools people are…

Because MOOCs bring big data to the forefront, they confront learning science with technology challenges. We describe an agenda for developing technology that enables MOOC analytics. Such an agenda needs to efficiently address the detailed, low level, high volume nature of MOOC data. It also needs to help exploit the data's capacity to reveal, in…

There are increasing demands for higher levels of data assurance in higher education. This paper explores some of the drivers for this trend, and then explains what stakeholders mean by the concept of data assurance, since this has not been well defined previously. The paper captures insights from existing literature, stakeholders, auditors, and…

The Common Core of Data (CCD) nonfiscal surveys consist of data submitted annually to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the four U.S. Island Areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently announced a proposal that will require all public companies to report their financial data in Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). XBRL is an extension of Extensible Markup Language (XML). Moving to a standard reporting format makes it easier for organizations to report the…

Creating effective electronic tools for language learning frequently requires large data sets containing extensive examples of actual human language use. Collections of authentic language in spoken and written forms provide developers the means to enrich their applications with real world examples. As the Internet continues to expand…

This report presents the results of an audit by the Office of the Inspector General to determine whether the Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) provided sufficient oversight of graduation and dropout rates submitted by states in their Consolidated State Performance Reports to ensure the rates were…

The accuracy and reliability aspects of data integrity are discussed, with an emphasis on the need for consistency in responsibility and authority. A variety of ways in which data integrity can be compromised are discussed. The following sources of data corruption are described, and the ease or difficulty of identification and suggested actions…

The major accomplishments in the development of a management system for academic library collection development were (1) the development of translation tables which express HEGIS (Higher Education General Information Survey) taxonomy terms as sets of LC (Library of Congress) class numbers; (2) the use of these tables to compare library…