Towards a Reference Ontology for Higher Education Knowledge Domain

Abstract

Most ontologies are application ontologies designed for specific applications. Reference ontology is able to contribute significantly in resolving or at least reducing the issue of ontology applications specificity and hence increasing ontology reusability. Particularly considering higher education domain, we think that a reference ontology dedicated to this knowledge area, can be regarded as a valuable tool for researchers and institutional employees interested in analyzing the system of higher education as a whole. This paper describes, a reference ontology called HERO ontology, which stands for “Higher Education Reference Ontology”. We explain HERO ontology building process from requirements specification until ontology evaluation using NeOn methodology. HERO ontology is projected to be a reusable and generalisable resource of academic knowledge which can be filtered to meet the needs of any knowledge-based application that requires structural information. It is distinct from application ontologies in that it is not intended as an end-user application and does not target the needs of any particular user group.