Creating the Context for Exploiting Linked Open Data in Multidimensional Academic Ranking

Abstract

Abstract-Academia is a complex socio-technical system with multiple aspects and constituents that involve various stakeholders. In order to address stakeholders' needs and to assist the institutional accountability, this complexity should be considered during the development of academic services. We have designed a dynamic multidimensional ranking approach, easily modifiable to address user requirements, so as to assess and compare the university performance with a clear view to the support of effective institutional strategic planning and policy making. Our approach comprises the following components: the AcademIS ontology to model the academic domain and its multiple dimensions, the AcademIS Information System to manage and display the academic information, published in Linked Open Data format and the visual-aided Multiple Criteria Decision Making component, to evaluate and rank the performance of the academic units. The data are aggregated from several sources, in different formats, LODified by our system, and presented to the user by the interface to ultimately assist the decision making process.

Visual-aided ontology-based ranking on multidimensional data: a case study in academia

“…Hence, an academic system should take into account the characteristics of the domain, as well as the varying background of its intended users. In this case study, we have considered the following dimensions of academia, based on van Vught and Ziegele (2013) and Triperina et al (2015): education, research, internationalization, local involvement, cooperation with industry; each dimension holds several criteria. The alternatives are the five faculties of a Greek Higher Education Institute represented as Faculty 1 (F1), Faculty 2 (F2), Faculty 3 (F3), Faculty 4 (F4) and Faculty (F5).…”

“…In the second part of the case study, the MOBVR system is examined, which relies on the principles of ELECTRE III, visual analytics and semantic web to respond to the multidimensional ranking problematic. The MOBVR ontology (Figure 3) has the following configuration, when applied to academia: the domain ontology is the AcademIS ontology (Triperina et al, 2015), the MCDM-base and MCDM-outputs ontologies reflect the characteristics and the parameters of the ELECTRE III method, while the ranking ontology captures the information regarding the various ranking profiles. In the MOBVR framework, all aforementioned dimensions and their criteria are considered.…”