Abstract— In this paper we present a learning environment based on the integration of 2 technologies that promise to shape the future of education: the mobile technologies and the semantic web. The educational potentials of mobile learning are briefly discussed in the paper, together with some of the difficulties in running and evaluating experiences of mobile learning. Amongst these difficulties, we focus on the workload for teachers who have to organize and develop up-to-date educational contents for mobile devices, followed by the risk of rapid obsolescence of the content; we argue that by integrating Linked Open Data, one of the most challenging product of the Semantic Web, with Mobile Learning technologies we can overtake these difficulties. In order to support our arguments, we introduce MeLOD, a mobile learning environment which exploits the huge amount of dataset in the Linked Open Data cloud to provide students with contextualized and continuously up-to-date information based on students’ location. The position of the student sent by the mobile device is used to interlink and explore GeoNames DBpedia and Europeana datasets and return information about all the interesting cultural heritage sites close to the student. Moreover, students produce new knowledge items that are gathered in a dataset created within the MeLOD project, which is compliant with the requirements for the LOD cloud. Finally, typical activities performed in the Social Web, such as voting and commenting, are used to enhance the knowledge base of the learning environment and to provide recommendations for next students’ visits. Keywords—Mobile Learning, Linked Open Data, Semantic Web. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Commerce under Grant BS123456 (sponsor and financial support acknowledgment goes here). Paper titles should be written in uppercase and lowercase letters, not all uppercase. Avoid writing long formulas with subscripts in the title; short formulas that identify the elements are fine (e.g., "Nd–Fe–B"). Do not write "(Invited)" in the title. Full names of authors are preferred in the author field, but are not required. Put a space between authors' initials. F. A. Author is with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO 80305 USA (corresponding author to provide phone: 303-555- 5555; fax: 303-555-5555; e-mail: author@ boulder.nist.gov). S. B. Author, Jr., was with Rice University, Houston, TX 77005 USA. He is now with the Department of Physics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523 USA (e-mail: author@lamar. colostate.edu). T. C. Author is with the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 USA, on leave from the National Research Institute for Metals, Tsukuba, Japan (e-mail: author@nrim.go.jp). I. INTRODUCTION T HE 8th wave of the Mediascope Europe Study [1], one of the most comprehensive research studies on how people dedicate their time to the various media in Europe, reports that more than 130 million Europeans routinely use their mobile phones to access the Internet. According to the Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) survey on the use of mobile technologies in Higher Education [2], students want to access academic progress information and course material via their mobile devices (such as smartphones, and tablet computers), and 67% of surveyed students believe mobile devices are important to their academic success and use their devices for academic activities. Likewise, the widespread use of mobile technology, along with the availability of efficient mobile broadband connections, offers a unique opportunity to develop innovative methods of learning as well as to develop policies aimed at participation, given that the use of mobile devices transcends age, social status, economic level, gender and ethnic origins [3]. In fact, in the last decade numerous studies about the use of mobile and wireless communication technologies in education have been reported [4]. In addition to these studies we observe an important increase of mobile learning penetration rate in some country, like Taiwan, where there are national programs and strategies for e-learning to support the innovation in educational context [5]. In the same direction, we foresee a similar trend in other countries, like Italy, where there is a wide diffusion of mobile technologies, and national government is going to adopt, in the public education system, electronic books and tablet as primary tools for learning. According to Horizon’ report [6] as well as to the roadmap of the National Science Foundation [7], Spector [8] analyzing recent research on emerging educational technologies highlighted that mobile technologies will have a significant impact on future learning and instruction. Although the effectiveness of mobile learning has been deeply explored by researchers and academics [9][10], the evaluation of a mobile learning experience is still problematic: according to Traxler [11], when we evaluate a mobile learning experience we have to consider a number of independent Mobile Learning with Linked Open Data Marco Arrigo, Davide Taibi, Giovanni Fulantelli Institute for Educational Technology National Research Council of Italy Palermo, Italy {marco.arrigo, davide.taibi, giovanni.fulantelli}@itd.cnr.it INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES Volume 8, 2014 ISSN: 2074-1316 211