A Step towards Better Understanding and Development of University Ontology in Education Domain

The sheer amount of data on the web, together with its distributed, redundant and inaccurate nature, makes using the information within rather cumbersome. This problem is often referred to as information overload". Though, this problem is largely being addressed by many advance technologies but they operate on text based searching ignoring the meaning of the data. These technologies lack ability to perform meaningful analysis and filtering of data, there by presenting results that only human can process and not machine. The objective of semantic web initiative was to provide meaningful web that can be processed by machines and humans equally. The web, which can judge the intent of human user and provide results that fulfill the information requirement accordingly. RDF/RDFS and OWL has been developed in order to facilitate this approach. Conceptual schemas known as ontologies are created for providing meaningful structure of data. Researchers with the help of domain experts have developed ontologies for many domains. However, there is a potential to create heterogeneous ontologies on a same domain as no common criteria exists for building ontologies. This paper presents a case study for the derivation and implementation of ontology in higher education domain. Author discusses the key concepts of the domain along with its data and object properties. Model is implemented in OWL 2.0 using protégé 4.0. This paper covers the major aspects of University domain including super class and subclass hierarchy, creating a subclass instances for class illustration, properties and their relations etc