A Core Ontology for Brazilian Higher Education Institutions

Cleiton Silva

and Orlando Belo

D.A.A., Federal Institute of Goiás, 75400-000 Inhumas-GO, Brazil

Algoritmi R&D Centre – School of Engineering, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal

Keywords: Ontologies, Semantic Web, Web Science, Ontology Networks, Linked Data, Institutional Evaluation,

Evaluation of Higher Education, SINAES.

Abstract: Within the past several years, Linked Open Data has reached a significant position in the Web, allowing for

a significant increase of structured data in this domain. Although this, there are a lot to be done in order to

ensure an effective way for supporting publication of connected open data. One of the strongest research and

development line in this area appeals to the use of ontologies for structuring data and their relationships.

Ontologies can be modeled for organizing knowledge about a domain, facilitating its sharing and reuse. As

such, we have been developed an ontology especially oriented to support the organizational structure of higher

education institutions in Brazil. This ontology was prepared for measuring and providing essential concepts

and reference models that can be used by different stakeholders to develop and use ontologies and

vocabularies for the National Higher Education Assessment System in Brazil. In this paper we present and

discuss the most relevant aspects we approached during the conceptualization and development of the referred

ontology.

1 INTRODUCTION

A Higher Education Institution (HEI) is a kind of

organization that operates in the field of higher

education. Like any other institution, a HEI exists for

pursuing the objectives established in the different

legal instruments, which in theory represent the

expectations of a national or a supranational society

that instituted them. Higher education in general, and

in particular the results achieved by HEI, attracts the

interest of different social actors (Bandeira et al.,

2015; Dias Sobrinho, 2010; Firmino, 2013).

In recent years, especially after the approval of

Law 12.527 of November 18, 2011 (Brasil, 2011),

known as the Law on Access to Information (LAI),

several documents and data related to the Brazilian

higher education field are being published on the Web

in different formats and without a reference

conceptualization. Thus, the reuse of such resources

for the production of new knowledge is quite limited,

particularly when one wishes to process them using

some kind of computational resource.

Problems such as these occur in different domains

as more data are produced, published and reused on

the Web. According to (O’Hara and Hall, 2011), the

Web Science community has been studying and

developed technologies in order to guarantee the

sustainability of the Web.

The Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, 2000; Berners-

Lee et al., 2006; Gruber, 2008; Sack et al., 2016;

d’Aquin and Motta, 2016) is a set of technologies

designed to make Web resources increasingly

suitable for the consumption of people and machines.

In (Silva and Belo, 2017) the authors highlight the

main contributions of the Semantic Web to the

implementation of the Data Web. In this work we are

particularly interested in the technologies and tools

used to add explicit semantics to datasets to be

published on the Web.

Ontologies have been used in different

applications domains, conferring explicit semantics

and models for knowledge representation, both for

the classic Web and for the new approaches where the

Web is increasingly as a very promising data

publishing platform (Silva and Belo, 2017).

However, a careful literature review as well as the

research carried out to date in the field did not identify

any specific ontology developed with the objective of

facilitating data interoperability in the domain of the

National Higher Education Assessment System

(SINAES).

Silva, C. and Belo, O.

A Core Ontology for Brazilian Higher Education Institutions.

DOI: 10.5220/0006792103770383

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2018), pages 377-383

ISBN: 978-989-758-291-2

 2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All r ights reserved

377

Thus, we believe that is quite opportune and

relevant to develop an initiative research where we

could offer theoretical and empirical contributions,

both in terms of knowledge advancement in ontology

engineering and in terms of data treatment and

exploration activities on the Web, as well as for the

improvement of production processes and

consumption of data in the field of higher education

in Brazil.

In this paper, we present a proposal of an ontology

especially oriented to support the organizational

structure of HEI in Brazil. This ontology is being

developed for measuring and providing essential

concepts and reference models that can be used by

different stakeholders to develop and use ontologies

and vocabularies for the SINAES domain. The

ontology proposed is integrated in a network of

ontologies – OntoSINAES, which is under

development in the course of a research project, in

which we intend to implement an environment for the

collaborative development of ontologies and

vocabularies for the domain of the SINAES. Thus,

following this brief introduction, in section 2, we

present a literature review about ontologies in Web

Science domain, highlighting some relevant works. In

section 3, we present and discuss the ontology

proposal, exposing its theoretical basis and the

empirical results already achieved. Finally, in section

4, we present conclusions and point out some lines for

future research and development.

2 RELATED WORK

The importance of the Web to today's society stems

from advances in knowledge promoted by a

community of researchers dedicated to making

electronic information gradually less ambiguous for

people and computers. This combination of efforts

enhance the expression “Web Science”, which is used

for representing a recent multidisciplinary area

dedicated to advance the knowledge about the Web,

both in terms of the technologies involved, and in

terms of the various aspects involving its

understanding as a specific phenomenon that affects

different dimensions of the current society (O’Hara

and Hall, 2011; Hendler et al., 2008; Hall and

Tiropanis, 2012). In this work, we are interested in

two different paradigms, namely: the Semantic Web

and Linked Data (or Linked Open Data). The

Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, 2000; Berners-Lee et

al., 2001; Berners-Lee et al., 2006) has been proposed

and is being developed with the aim to make the

content of the Web more suitable for use both for

people and computers. Ontologies occupy a central

position in the conceptual model of the Semantic

Web. In (Horrocks, 2002), Horrocks considers that

ontologies can offer important contributions for a

sustainable evolution of the Semantic Web, mainly by

providing explicit semantics to the contents available

on the Web, which favors their functioning from

precisely defined sources of terms. Linked Data is a

set of principles proposed by (Berners-Lee, 2006) for

the publication of data on the Web. Linked Open Data

is a movement within the World Wide Web

Consortium (W3C) community, which aims to make

the connected data available, free of charge.

Combining these both ideas, we come to the Web

paradigm as an open and connected data platform.

Based on the main ideas of the article, we will use the

terms “data connected” and “data open and

connected” for referring Linked Data and Linked

Open Data, respectively. According to the W3C

(Anon, 2017), “Web of Data will become a reality

when: (1) there is an enormous amount of data

available, and (2) exists a standard format accessible

and manageable by semantic Web tools.” In this

sense, additionally to the Resource Description

Framework (RDF), as a standard format, it is also

necessary to ensure free access to data and to all the

relationships that may exist among them, in order to

have effectively open and connected data. In some

perspectives, the RDF standard provides the basis for

the publication of connected data, while ontologies

and vocabularies provide the basis to formalize the

different relationships between the data in a way that

makes them quite useful. Many authors highlight the

importance of ontologies, both in terms of

guaranteeing higher levels of interoperability among

data, and for providing semantic enrichment of

knowledge bases.

The literature review has revealed several works

(O’Leary, 2010; Reynolds, 2014a; Pereira and

Almeida, 2014; Abramowicz et al., 2008) dealing

with the use of ontologies for providing

organizational conceptual models and in some cases

especially oriented for the field of higher education

(Falbo et al., 2014; Zemmouchi-Ghomari and

Ghomari, 2013; Styles and Wallace, 2008; Pereira,

2015). The following is a brief summary of three

papers, which deal specifically with organizational

structures. For each of the cases described there, we

try to point out an adequate interface to this work. The

ontology published in (Reynolds, 2014) is a

conceptual reference model for organizational

structures recommended by the W3C, in order to

support the publication of connected data. It should

be noted that this organizational ontology was

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

378

designed to be generic, reusable and extended, and

thus it is available for access in several formats,

through the link https://www.w3.org/TR/

vocabOrg/#organizational_structure. Considering

our objective for developing a conceptual reference

model for representing the organizational structure of

Brazilian HEI, the ontology proposed by the W3C

was used as a starting point for the development of

the core ontology designed by us. Some authors

emphasize that corporate ontologies are useful for

many purposes, among which support the publication

of connected data. According to (Falbo et al., 2014),

an enterprise ontology should be: (1) flexible, to

allow specialization in specific ontology projects; (2)

broad, to the point of covering the whole application

field; and (3) modular, so that only relevant fragments

can be selected for each specific reality of the domain

to be conceptualized. The authors of this work

demonstrated their points of view through an

ontology of the Brazilian Federal Universities.

Our work extends the domain described by the

ontology proposed in (Falbo et al., 2014), but dealing

also with the other types of HEI. Finally, we

discovered in (Pereira, 2015) a proposal of an

organizational reference ontology, specified in a

meta-model and conceived in accordance with the

ontological distinctions of the Unified Ontology

Fundamental (UFO), which extends the social

concepts of UFO-C (Guizzardi, 2005). This core

ontology, called OntoUML Organizational Ontology

(O3), was designed for using as a reference model in

the definition of organizational structures. One of the

objectives of O3 is to support the creation of domain

ontologies through the specialization of its concepts

and relations (Pereira, 2015). In this work – similar to

what we are developing –, the author presents a model

of the domain of the active structure of organizations.

As so, the conceptual model of O3 has become an

ontological resource quite relevant to the

development of the ontology we present and discuss

in this paper. According to what was possible to note

in our literature review, we may conclude that the use

of ontologies for representing organizational

structures, besides being feasible, can offer relevant

contributions for producing and consuming open and

connected data on the Web.

3 THE ONTOLOGY

Ontologies have been the object of study of several

works since the antiquity. In the last few years, many

concepts of ontologies have been presented and

defended by several authors within the Computer

Science (Guizzardi, 2005; Gruber, 1993; Guarino,

1995; Noy and McGuinness, 2001; Almeida, 2013;

Guarino, 1998). However, we can see an ontology as

a logical theory that explains the intended meaning of

a formal vocabulary, which is its ontological

commitment to a particular conceptualization of the

world (Guarino, 1998). Take this into consideration

we develop the main theoretical foundations and a

meta-model for the core ontology we present and

discuss in this paper, with the objective of providing

a minimum conceptualization of references for the

organizational structure of Brazilian HEI. Core

ontologies occupy an intermediate position between

the superior (or foundation) ontologies and domain

ontologies. In general, core ontologies rely on

foundation ontologies to add real world semantics to

conceptual models, avoiding ambiguities and making

them more independent of the domain. The

development of this core ontology is being based on

Methodology for Building Ontology Networks

(NeOn) (Suárez-Figueroa, 2010).

3.1 Requirements Specification

The core ontology we are presenting here aims to

provide a semantic model to represent formally the

IES organizational structure, covering all the general

concepts referenced in the legislation that regulates

the SINAES – as reference ontology, it must be

formal and implemented in OWL DL version 2. The

ontology was designed in a way that any intelligent

agent interested in the production, use or reuse of

information about higher education in Brazil could be

use it, involving knowledge about the organizational

structures of HEI. At this stage – requirements

specification – we prepared and generated the

correspondent Ontology Requirements Specification

Document (ORSD) for the ontology. In this document

we included a set of non-functional requirements

(general aspects not related directly to the content of

the ontology) and a set of functional requirements.

The non-functional requirements were defined taking

into account the motivation and the scope of this

work. They are:

 RNF-01 – the ontology should be described

and documented in Portuguese.

 RNF-02 – all the concepts related to the

ontology will be classified according to the

ontological categories defined by the Unified

Foundational Ontology (UFO) (Guizzardi,

2005), (Guizzardi et al., 2008), using the

OntoUML language for development,

verification and validation of the model

(Albuquerque and Guizzardi, 2013).

A Core Ontology for Brazilian Higher Education Institutions

379

 RNF-03 – the ontology should be implemented

in OWL DL version 2;

 RNF-04 – the ontology should formally

integrate the OntoSINAES ontology network.

Table 1: Competence questions for the initial iteration.

The functional requirements were specified based on

a set of competency questions (CQ), formulated

based on a thorough analysis of the concepts and

relationships between them that were verified in legal

texts regulating higher education in Brazil and

directly related to the structure of HEI. The initial set

of functional requirements was considered stable and

adequate for the purposes of a first iteration of the

core ontology lifecycle we designed. The initial CQ

set was obtained essentially from the analysis of the

Law 10.861, from April 14, 2004 (Brasil, 2004),

which is known as the SINAES Law. Then all the CQ

were grouped into several categories, each one

representing different aspects of the organizational

structure of HEI. In order to facilitate the

understanding of the domain, these categories

represent ontology modules that may guide the

development of specific ontologies in the future. The

set of functional requirements, in the form of CQ, was

then submitted to a validation process, based on the

verification of the criteria suggested by the NeOn

methodology, namely concision, correction,

consistency and lack of ambiguities. Domain experts

attended the validation process. Finally, the

requirements were prioritized in order to be satisfied

in two iterations. In Table 1, we can find the CQ

defined to be answered at the end of the first iteration,

grouped into categories. The last step of the ontology

specification process was the organization of a pre-

glossary of terms directly related to CQ, their

responses and named entities.

3.2 Project Planning

The design of the ontology project was based on

ORSD. At this stage we tried to organize in a timely

manner the different processes and activities to be

executed during the development process of the

ontology. The lifecycle model chosen it is based by

an incremental iterative approach. Thus, this work

takes as reference the execution of the first iteration,

which included several scenarios of NeOn, namely

the scenarios 1, 2 and 3 (Suárez-Figueroa, 2010,

p.83).

To choose the life cycle model and the respective

scenarios, we considered a specific set of CQ and

non-functional requirements. Given the complexity

of the domain of SINAES and the diversity of the

organizational structures that are established among

the Brazilian HEI, we decide for reusing non-

ontological resources, which can be found in official

information sources such as government websites,

particularly the Brazilian Portal of Open Data (Brasil,

2017), and the laws and other official documents

related to SINAES. As for the ontological resources,

in this first iteration we had by reference the

ontologies proposed in (Reynolds, 2014; Pereira,

2015). In Figure 1, presents a general overview of the

main phases of the first iteration of the ontology

development project life cycle.

Competence Questions

(

)

CQ Answers

CQ-001:

What are the Brazilian

HEI classified as

university institution?

Listing of all the

institutions that act in the

offer of higher education

in Brazil, which have the

legal prerogatives of

university and university

cente

CQ-002:

What are the Brazilian

HEI classified as

university?

Listing of all the

institutions that act in the

offer of higher education

in Brazil, which have the

legal prerogatives of

universit

CQ-003:

What are the Brazilian

HEI classified as

university center?

Listing of all the

institutions that act in the

offer of higher education

in Brazil, which have the

legal prerogatives of

universit

cente

CQ-004:

What are the Brazilian

HEI classified as non-

university?

Listing of all the

institutions that act in the

offer of higher education,

which according to the

Brazilian legislation are

considered as non-

universit

HEI.

CQ-005:

Who is the sponsor of the

HEI?

An individual or legal

entity that provides the

necessary resources for the

eration of the HEI.

CQ-006:

Which are the regulatory

acts that classify HEI as

university, university

center and non-university

HEI?

Relation of regulatory acts

of HEI accreditation and

re-accreditation.

CSEDU 2018 - 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

380

Figure 1: The development project life cycle model.

The NeOn methodology prescribes for the life cycle

based on an incremental iterative model, an initial

phase that is oriented to the elaboration of a global

development plan, containing a set of basic ontology

requirements. Subsequently, during the initiation

phase of each iteration, the detailed iteration

planning, a review of the set of initial requirements,

and the overall development plan are carried out.

Each iteration can be regulated for one of the five

versions that the cascade model provides in the NeOn

methodology. For the first iteration of this project we

chose the cascade model with six phases, taking into

account the need for reengineering the ontological

and non-ontological resources.

3.3 Conceptualization and

Formalization

In these phases we produced the conceptual and

formal models of the ontology. For the production

and validation of the models, we used the OntoUML

Lightweight Editor – OLED tool (Ufes, 2017). The

OntoUML language is a profile of the Unified

Modeling Language (UML), with an ontological

basis based on the UFO ontology. The tool allows for

constructing and validating the conceptual models in

OntoUML, and generating automatically their

implementations in RDF, OWL and UML.

In Figure 2, we can see a fragment of the

conceptual model of the ontology we developed.

Figure 2: A fragment of the conceptual model of the

ontology.

The fragment presented highlights some of the most

essential concepts of the organizational structure and

organizational roles, which together make up the

abstract concept of a Brazilian HEI. The concept of

HEI specializes the concept of organization (Firmino,

2013; Brasil, 2011). Like any other kind of

organization, HEI are social agents explicitly

instituted to develop higher education in Brazil. The

HEI concept was specialized in institution and

academic units. An institution is a type of formal

organization, recognized by the external

environment, while an academic unit is an

organizational unit, recognized in the internal context

of an institution. Academic units represent the

working groups of an institution. The model also

indicates that an HEI is accredited at the moment of

its constitution, as a university, university center or as

a non-university. At the time of its existence,

regulatory acts will determine the maintenance or

change of its classification.

3.4 COrg Ontology: Implementation

The portion of knowledge of the domain of SINAES

that in the previous stage was organized in a formal

and well-founded conceptual model, in this phase was

transformed into a computable model, using the

Protégé tool (Musen and Team, 2015). Based on the

ORSD, the ontology language used was the OWL DL

version 2.

Because it is a core ontology, the relationships

between concepts and formal properties in the

conceptual model were enriched with new constraints

and axioms, aiming to increase the ontology's

expressiveness and inference capacity. The ontology

implemented in this work is the first version of the

Core Ontology of the HEI organizational structure in

Brazil (COrg).

In Figure 3, we present the main classes that are

already part of the ontology.

Figure 3: A screenshot of the COrg for HEI in Brazil.

A Core Ontology for Brazilian Higher Education Institutions

381

The COrg ontology is an extension of the ontology of

organizations (ORG) (Reynolds, 2014b)

recommended by the W3C. The ontology ORG has a

reference taxonomy, on which there already exists a

consensus established by the use in different projects

and domains.

The reuse of ontological resources is a good

practice already consolidated by the ontology

engineering community. In this sense, during the last

iteration, the "pruning" of the ontology will be

performed, aiming at the removal of elements

considered irrelevant for the scope of COrg. This

activity aims to make the resulting ontology suitable

for reuse, extension or specialization in other projects

and applications.

4 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

The environment of an organization usually involves

several activity domains, some geographic dispersion

and different social actors. It is increasingly

challenging to organize the knowledge necessary for

the healthy and productive development of activities

in different organizational contexts.

However, the scientific literature demonstrates

that corporate ontologies can be very useful for such

purposes. Additionally, the literature also shows that

large ontologies, particularly when involving

multiple domains, can be developed as a network of

ontologies containing different types of ontologies

smaller, simpler, and mainly more suited to more

specific and dynamic requirements. It was also

verified that a network of ontologies it will better

developed through intense collaboration, especially

among general stakeholders, domain experts and

ontology engineers. In this case, the "added value" of

collaboration would be a conceptualization of

consensus, from which new concepts could be

formalized and reused.

Therefore, in our opinion a network of ontologies

in which one intends to contribute to the organization

of corporate knowledge should provide a “beginning

point”, a set of well-founded general conceptual

categories, organized in networks of core ontologies

or ontology patterns. The development of the

ontology has demonstrated that the identification of

the fundamental concepts must be gradual and very

well founded, so that they can effectively be

specialized in different ontologies and preserving the

conceptual reference that is necessary to guarantee

the semantic interoperability of the data. Regarding

the conceptualization aspects for the development of

the ontology, the legal framework was the main

source of conceptual categories, by the fact that being

in force the laws can be considered as social

"consensuses". The analysis of the legislation was

also relevant to ensure the existence of conceptual

categories that covered the entire domain of SINAES.

It is our opinion that in projects developed for

contexts similar to SINAES, the laws are unavoidable

non-ontological resources, particularly at the

beginning of projects.

As future work, we intend to integrate COrg into

the network of ontologies we are developing within

the OntoSINAES project. The project also foresees

the implementation of a Web environment to support

the collaborative development of knowledge

representation models for the SINAES domain.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-

01-0145-FEDER-007043, by FCT – Fundação para a

Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope:

UID/CEC/00319/2013 and by CAPES Foundation,

Ministry of Education of Brazil.

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