The use of ontologies and rules to assist in academic advising

Abstract

Undergraduate academic advisors, schools of graduate studies, and other organizations are often responsible for understanding and evaluating high-school and university transcripts from culturally and organizationally different institutions. Such a task raises several problems including diverse grading approaches, incompatible academic credit systems, and translating between languages. Although many such problems are most sensitive in a world (or international) evaluation, they can occur between institutions within the same country as well. The present paper proposes a possible methodology toward overcoming such conflicts using a University-Course-Credit-Grade (UCCG) ontology and translation rules for interoperability of credit systems and grade systems between institutions. As proof of concept, the UCCG ontology is initially populated with example instances from four institutions, using Protégé-2000 to build the ontology, RDF(S) to store it, and POSL to store the university instances and translation rules. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.