Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics, Ukraine

1
Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics,
Ukraine
Case Study from our Ukrainian Partner

• Ontology-Based Portal for National Educational
  and Scientific Resources Management

Masha Klymova
2
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.

3
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

4
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.

5
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.

6
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

7
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.

8
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.

9
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.

10
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.

11
Other possible scenarios

• Ranking
• Accreditation
• Licensing
• Monitoring
• Reporting

12
Model of the systems interaction
13
Portal architecture
Application Server
Ontology server
client
client
client
14
Ontology-Driven Interface
Task area (e.g. Resource registration)
The objects type selection area (e.g.
University)
The object filter (e.g. Kharkov University)
The document and parameters type selection
area e.g. General Info
Content area
Tips area
15
Ontology-driven interface generation

• The ontological information about the structure
  in the accreditation documents

information about the structure of interface
Creation of the interface
page
table
field
16
Modules of the system
Systems kernel
Access control system
Audit system
Common managing system
17
Fragment of the ontology structure
18
RDFS data model of the system
19
RDF-content management

• Obtaining RDF from the knowledge base of the
  system.
• RDF-content modifying via interface.

20
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.

21
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.

22
The ontology portal, home page

• The authentication module on the ontology basis
  is created, with its help its possible to
  organize any users rights flexibly.

23
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.

24
The mode of information preview

• All 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.

25
The mode of information editing

• The values of the parameters which reflect the
  Ministry resources indicators can be
• added
• modified
• deleted.

26
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.

27
Atomic properties (example)
28
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.

29
Computable properties (example)
30
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.

31
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
32
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.

33
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

34
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

35
Slides

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