Digitizing curricula: An approach for digital usability

Steering documents for school, i.e. curricula, syllabi, subject plans and the Education Act, are not generally available in a digitally usable format. That complicates, for example, the process of building advanced curriculum-based services for schools in which individual elements are traceable. To address this problem, Swedish subject syllabi incorporating knowledge requirements for compulsory school were analyzed in terms of their structure, content type and relationship to the subject, year, and grade level. Markup describing the documents was added using Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and Linked Data to make the documents digitally usable. This paper presents a method for analyzing and marking up national steering documents. Digitally usable steering documents open up for services in which digital learning resources are connected to specific parts of the steering documents or in which steering documents from various countries can be compared, for example concerning PISA results.