Supporting Learning Activities in the Health Sector through Open Data

Abstract

The growing availability of Open Data for educational purposes is playing a key role in shaping and influencing the development of the learning processes. At the same time, Open Data have a particular potential in the health sector so that the major healthcare organizations, universities, colleges, and medical schools are in the process of creating high quality 'Open' education & training resources and tools. However, in this growing world of open health resources for educational purposes, the task of finding the right material can become very difficult mainly when using a general purpose search engine like google. Thus, to overcome this problem and facilitate the search and learning activities in the health domain, we are in the process of building a system that collects open health datasets, applications and projects/initiatives and creates a single entry point to those resources so greatly facilitating the task of a teacher/student in finding what he/she is exactly looking for. In this paper we present the benefit of using Health Open Data for educational purposes together with the basics details of the system we are developing and one practical example of usage.