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Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics, Ukraine

Ontology-Based Portal for National Educational and Scientific Resources Management

Masha Klymova

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Actual problems• AMBIGUITY: There is a problem of ambiguous information about educational and

scientific resources– different information about the same resources is being managed by different

organizational units;

• INCONSISTENCY: Inconsistency of the parameters of the resources is the result of permanent uncontrolled updates of the information about the resources without synchronization;

• LACK of TRUST: Reported parameters’ values are not easily verified of their correctness (it takes much time and human resources as the procedure is not automated);

• LACK of FLEXIBILITY: The structure of the educational and scientific processes in organization is permanently developing and this often leads to a cardinal changes of the appropriate ICT infrastructure.

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Solution•Creation of a flexible, standardized and personalized, secure, web-oriented information/knowledge management system for academic resources.

•Such system will be organized as Ontology-Based Portal for National Educational and Scientific Resources Management

•Academic resources are: – Organizations (Ministry, universities, institutes, schools, faculties, departments etc);– Academic documents (study programs, curricula, recommendations, instructions,

manuals, textbooks, etc;– People (administration, teachers, researchers, students, etc);– Facilities (classes, computers, equipments, etc)– Scientific products (dissertations, papers, degrees)– Processes and activities (lectures, conferences, workshops, testing, etc)– Etc… all entities related to science and education and appeared in reporting

documents from educational establishments

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How can this be performed?

• Use of the ontological approach allows to solve the problems mentioned above;

• The system provides Web access to information resource (both data (resources) and metadata (annotations) of it);

• The ontological kernel provides basis for software interoperability.

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What problems can be solved ?• Accumulation of the metadata about the national educational and

scientific resources in the centralized on-line system with appropriate access control;

• Creation of the informational log for each of the resources (which allows version control of the resource during its life cycle);

• Automates and simplifies various organizational processes (e.g. accreditation, ranking, quality assurance, etc.);

• Guarantees openness and transparency of various quality control procedures.

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Use case scenario (1)

• Wanted: to rank national Universities according to e.g. following criteria:– (A) Amount of full-time professors per student;– (B) Amount of papers published in international journals per

professor;– (C) Amount of computer classes per student

• using ranking formula e.g.: Rank = 0.4 * A + 0.5 * B + 0.1 * C

• and provide transparency of ranking procedure and results

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Use case scenario (2)

• Universities register each new resource online at the portal in appropriate class of the resources in the ontology:– professor;– student;– journal paper with the link to publisher;– computer class;– etc.

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Use case scenario (3)• Ministry of Education (for example) creates (through

appropriate interface of the portal) new criteria for the universities ranking:– (A) Amount of full-time professors per student;– (B) Amount of papers published in international journals per

professor;– (C) Amount of computer classes per student

• and these criteria will be automatically transformed to the appropriate formal queries to registered resources at the portal. Based on calculations on queries output results, the values to the new criteria will be obtained, saved and constantly updated in the portal for each university.

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Use case scenario (4)• Ministry of Education also creates (through appropriate

interface of the portal) new formula for university ranking based on the criteria:

Rank = 0.4 * A + 0.5 * B + 0.1 * C• and this formula will be automatically transformed to

appropriate formal procedure applied to each university and their valid criteria values. Based on calculations the values of current ranks will be obtained, saved and constantly updated in the portal for each university and each registered ranking procedure.

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Use case scenario (5)

• Transparency of the procedure:• Anyone who has access to the resources registered at the

portal can easily check content behind every value of every parameter of every criteria of every university

• For example if the value of parameter: – amount of journal papers in international publishers = 35

• Then by clicking 35 one obtains the list of the papers with reference to the publisher; further clicks result to opportunity to see full text paper and the publisher web page, etc.

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Other possible scenarios

• Ranking• Accreditation• Licensing• Monitoring• Reporting• …

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Model of the systems` interaction

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Portal architectureApplication Server Ontology server

clientclient

client

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Ontology-Driven Interface

Task area(e.g. “Resource registration”)

The objects type selection area(e.g. “University”)

The document and parameters type

selection areae.g. “General Info”

The object filter(e.g. “Kharkov University”)

Content area

Tips area

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Ontology-driven interface generation

information about the structure of interface

Creation of the interface

The ontological information about the structure in the accreditation documents

page

table

field

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Modules of the system

Resources` registration

Tasks module

Accreditation Ranking

Access control system Audit system

System`s kernel

Common managing system

The reports making system

The Web-interface making system

The interface making module

Ontology store system

The ontological knowledge base

structureOntology server

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Fragment of the ontology structure

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RDFS data model of the system

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RDF-content managementObtaining RDF from the knowledge base of the system.

RDF-content modifying via interface.

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Advantages of the ontology use

• Ontology evolution does not influence the work of the applications and the query engine;

• More smart queries are possible;

• The possibility to utilize comfortable ontology navigation/browsing tools.

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Access control system

Peculiarities:• Access rights to certain resource is managed as

special property of the resource together with other properties in the ontology;

• Inheritance in taxonomies and part_of hierarchies is taken into account in access rights coordination;

• Development of the system for access rights` auditing, setting and controlling.

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The ontology portal, home page

The authentication module on the ontology basis is created, with its help it`s possible to organize any user`s rights flexibly.

login

password

choice of the language

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The module of the information management

• It provides the possibility of the access to the information about the current resources state;

• Provides the possibility of the information modification;

• Provides the calculation of the computable parameters on the basis of the current information.

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The mode of information previewAll the information about Ministry resources should be transparently presented through the system of the tables.

The information is collected as a set of the parameters values.

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The mode of information editingThe values of the parameters which reflect the Ministry resources` indicators can be:•added;•modified;•deleted.

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Properties of the resources

• Each resource registered at the portal may contain properties of two types:– computable (their value is calculated automatically based on

the description joined to the field and can not be modified manually);

• For example, amount of full professors, average age of personnel, etc.

– atomic (their values are being set evidently pointing out at some information resource or literal).

• For example, name of department, title of paper, telephone number etc.

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Atomic properties (example)

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Computable properties

• The computable properties are divided into 3 types:– The fields containing the summing operation;– The fields containing a typical formula;– The combined fields;

• For each of the types its own information presentation system is performed.

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Computable properties (example)

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The accreditation module

Assigned for the process of the documentation for accreditation simplification;

The main components of the module:– The main accreditation module;– The information accumulation and archiving system.

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Accreditation procedure (phase 1)The parameters needed for the accreditation process are collected in the corresponding tables.

The mode of accounting tables creation is chosen

Year selection

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Accreditation procedure (phase 2)

The resulting tables include parameters calculated by the formula based on the values stored in different places of the knowledge base.

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What is ready at the present moment

• The first beta version is developed. It contains functionality restrictions: Computable fields restrictions and creation result document restrictions

• http://dev.bw.slyip.com

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Ongoing projects

• EU Tempus Tacis SCM Project T020B06 (2007-2008) Title: “Towards Transparent Ontology-Based Accreditation”

• Ministry of Science and Education of Ukraine project (2006 - …)

Title: “Ontology-Based Portal for Management and Evaluation of National Scientific and Educational Resources”

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Slides

• This presentation slides: – http://www.cs.jyu.fi/ai/OntoPortal-2007.ppt