Developing Higher Education Ontology Using Protégé Tool: Reasoning

Abstract

The high volume of data presents on the Web in semi-structured forms such as XML and HTML render the task of retrieval of information difficult for either for the search engines or information retrieval systems. Moreover, majority of the search engines are depending mostly on keywords that make automated Web search operation, about 70% of the times, to end up with retrieval of un-useful and irrelevant documents. To resolve the above issue, Tim Berners-Lee proposed intelligent and machine readable Web called as the Semantic Web in which metadata is associated with every entity on the Web. Resource Description Format (RDF) is offering a set of concepts to describe the metadata of the elements. RDF is a universal semantic model which lets the designer to describe the resources in his vocabulary without any regard to the domain of the problem. Hence, ontologies are introduced to formalize the association of metadata and semantics to each entity which becomes very much useful in Semantic Web for information processing, knowledge sharing across application systems and makes the data is machine readable. Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a markup language to implement Semantic Web and servers to share the ontologies and enables the agent-based communication while correctly interpreting the meaning of the Web document. However, there are fewer ontology development tools available for researchers that are generic to any domain. In our paper, we develop an ontology in the domain of higher education (engineering) domain using Protégé 4.3 tool. The associations among the resources are presented in the form of onto graphs/OWLViz, and the correctness of the class hierarchy is assessed by Fact++. Finally, the execution of semantic query for retrieval of the knowledge using SPARQL.