Ontology-Based Linked Data to Support Decision-Making within Universities

Abstract

In recent years, educational institutions have worked hard to automate their work using more trending technologies that prove the success in supporting decision-making processes. Most of the decisions in educational institutions rely on rating the academic research profiles of their staff. An enormous amount of scholarly data is produced continuously by online libraries that contain data about publications, citations, and research activities. This kind of data can change the accuracy of the academic decisions, if linked with the local data of universities. The linked data technique in this study is applied to generate a link between university semantic data and a scientific knowledge graph, to enrich the local data and improve academic decisions. As a proof of concept, a case study was conducted to allocate the best academic staff to teach a course regarding their profile, including research records. Further, the resulting data are available to be reused in the future for different purposes in the academic domain. Finally, we compared the results of this link with previous work, as evidence of the accuracy of leveraging this technology to improve decisions within universities.

Data-driven Decision Making in Higher Education Institutions: State-of-play

“…The studies by Ashour et al [10,44] proposed educational ontology and linked data techniques to support the process for selecting the most appropriate and qualified teacher for a new course. The ontology summarizes the long steps of mapping course content and faculty member profiles, while the linked data technique generates a link between university semantic data and research data from online libraries.…”

“…This process is significant for any HEI and determines its future stability and development. HEIs' managers can apply the tools to identify and differentiate candidates' personal and professional qualities [10] and to predict their advancement and performance determined for different occupations and hierarchy levels [10]. Based on generated reports on the structure of the academic staff and the free hours in separate units, the governing bodies can make informed decisions about announcing competitions for the development of the academic staff.…”

“…Based on generated reports on the structure of the academic staff and the free hours in separate units, the governing bodies can make informed decisions about announcing competitions for the development of the academic staff. Such tools help managers to improve the selection process [40,45] and evaluate teachers' work, to select the most appropriate teacher for a new course based on course content and academic staff qualifications [10]. In addition, HEIs' leadership can make decisions to stimulate www.ijacsa.thesai.org teachers to update curricula, learning resource and change teaching methods [46][47][48] and thus, to provide students with a better learning environment and enhance the quality of training [34].…”

“…The ontology summarizes the long steps of mapping course content and faculty member profiles. In a subsequent study, Ashour [10] proposed a solution to support the selection process through the Linked data. They apply the technique to generate a link between university semantic data and research data from online libraries.…”

“…The last requires investments in appropriate technologies which support all management processes [10], e.g. incl.…”