Researcher Profile Ontology for Academic Environment

Abstract

Universities must know the research profiles and professional competences of professors and researchers to be more competitive and know how to offer creative solutions (through courses, diplomas, research projects, etc.) to complex needs of society. Therefore the representation, management, and exploitation of researcher profiles are important tasks that must be addressed. In this paper we investigate on the use of ontologies as the main solution approach to support the representation of researcher profiles in a given academic environment. We describe the ontology model design, the automatic ontology population process, and the discovery and enrichment of interesting semantic relations between researcher profiles. The functional competency of the resulting ontology is evaluated utilizing a set of inference rules and queries.