A core ontology for Brazilian higher education institutions

Within the past several years, Linked Open Data has reached a significant position in the Web, allowing for a significant increase of structured data in this domain. Although this, there are a lot to be done in order to ensure an effective way for supporting publication of connected open data. One of the strongest research and development line in this area appeals to the use of ontologies for structuring data and their relationships. Ontologies can be modeled for organizing knowledge about a domain, facilitating its sharing and reuse. As such, we have been developed an ontology especially oriented to support the organizational structure of higher education institutions in Brazil. This ontology was prepared for measuring and providing essential concepts and reference models that can be used by different stakeholders to develop and use ontologies and vocabularies for the National Higher Education Assessment System in Brazil. In this paper we present and discuss the most relevant aspects we approached during the conceptualization and development of the referred ontology.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043, by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013 and by CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil