The Open University (OU) is the world leader in distance teaching and the largest university in the UK. It is also well known as the UK's most innovative and high-impact concept in higher education which has re-shaped the notion of quality distance learning. The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 in recognition of the need for the OU to be at the forefront of research and development in a convergence of areas that impacted on the OU's very nature. Approximately 70 researchers, technologists and designers work in the fields of the semantic Web and knowledge services, knowledge management, social software, new media systems, narrative hypermedia, and multimedia systems. Relevant EU projects are DIP (507483) SUPER (026850), LUISA (027149) and NeOn (027595).

Role in the project: OU will lead WP5, the work on the use of Semantic Web Services for context-adaptive discovery of eLearning resources. Additionally, contributions will be provided to the semantic integration of heterogeneous resources and context modelling.

Prof. Dr. John Domingue, the Deputy Director and Professor at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMI) will lead the team at OU. Additional key researchers at KMI will be Dong Liu and Neil Benn; both bringing in experience from EC projects in the areas of eLearning and Semantic Web Services.