EducOnto: An Ontology for Education

EducOnto is made available as an open-source resource under the Apache 2.0 license

Motivations

Owing to the intricacies of the educational domain, several ontologies have been proposed to model the richness of the field. Apart from its inner complexity, education is also a high stakes domain. In particular, educational guidance can be stressfull for high school seniors struggling to make a choice. The transition from the last year of high school and the first year of university is a pivotal moment for every student. Unfortunately, we did not find any available ontology modelling this specific concern. We then choose to develop our own ontology - EducOnto - and make it publicly available to foster research.

Overview

Below, a conceptual overview of EducOnto is depicted. It provides a first glimpse of the ontology as a whole. For clarity, we only includes the main classes and shorten the relationships' labels. The separation between students' profiles, their high school educational paths and the domain of higher education is made visible.

Description

In this subsection, we give a deeper insight into EducOnto. In particular, we give the reader a better understanding of how the different classes and properties have been designed, what they stand for and what their interactions are. Below are the main classes of EducOnto and what they stand for:

Class	Description	Example of Instance
educonto:AcademicSkill	Skill that a student possesses	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/good_memory&gt
educonto:Curriculum	University curriculum	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/curriculum/lg_psycho&gt
educonto:FieldOfStudy	Field of Study	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/engineering&gt
educonto:HighSchoolMajor	Chosen major in high school	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/major/ts&gt
educonto:HighSchoolSpecialty	Chosen specialty in high school	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/spe/arts&gt
educonto:Keyword	Can be linked to student and seen as a center of interest. Can be linked to university curricula and high school majors and be seen as a descriptive feature	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/healthcare&gt
educonto:Person	High school senior or Undergraduate student	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/stud/user999&gt
educonto:PersonalityTrait	Personality trait a student possesses	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/investigative&gt
educonto:SchoolSubject	School subject taught at school	&lthttp://purl.org/edukg/chemistry&gt

Below are some of the 30 object properties of EducOnto. For clarity, we do not include the object properties whose meaning and domain-range pair are obvious.

Object Property	Domain	Range
educonto:belongsToFieldOfStudy	educonto:Curriculum	educonto:FieldOfStudy
educonto:hasFavoriteSchoolSubject	educonto:Person	educonto:SchoolSubject
educonto:hasMainTopic	educonto:HighSchoolMajor	educonto:SchoolSubject
educonto:hasSkill	educonto:Person	educonto:AcademicSkill
educonto:isInterestedInKeyword	educonto:Person	educonto:Keyword
...	...	...
educonto:mentionedCurriculum	educonto:Person	educonto:Curriculum
educonto:pickedGeneralMajor	educonto:Person	educonto:GeneralMajor
educonto:recommendsHighSchoolMajor	educonto:Curriculum	educonto:HighSchoolMajor
educonto:recommendsHighSchoolSpecialty	educonto:Curriculum	educonto:HighSchoolSpecialty
educonto:requiresHighSchoolMajor	educonto:Curriculum	educonto:HighSchoolMajor
educonto:requiresHighSchoolSpecialty	educonto:Curriculum	educonto:HighSchoolSpecialty

In order to comply with the FAIR principles for scientific data management, standard Semantic Web vocabularies are integrated into EducOnto metadata. This is essential for properly describing the ontology, thus avoiding any possible misinterpretation. Below are the vocabularies we used to describe EducOnto metadata with their respective namespaces:

Ontology Namespaces

Prefix	Hyperlink
dc	Dublin Core Term
ed	EducOnto
owl	Web Ontology Language
rdf	Resource Description Framework
rdfs	RDF Schema
xml	Extensible Markup Language
xsd	XML Schema Definition

Download

EducOnto can be downloaded in .owl format at the following link: educonto.owl