Ontological Representation of Academic Programs

Using legal terminology, academic institutions release teaching and examination regulations to form the statutory framework of academic programs. This terminology is one reason why students often do not know how to satisfy the program requirements laid down by the corresponding institutions. This can result in needlessly long study times. Frequent changes of those regulations and parallel valid different regulations forming the statutory framework of programs leading to the same degrees may aggravate those problems. Furthermore, academic boards have to supply an amount of courses which fits the students’ actual demand. This is a difficult task because there is only little information available for forecasting. In this paper, we present an ontology to handle these problems. It allows semantic representations of examination regulations and academic programs. Based upon this ontology, decision support systems can be implemented which can help students to decide how to satisfy the corresponding program regulations or which can help academic boards to forecast the students’ demand on certain courses