Creation of Ontology in Education Domain Ayesha Ameen I.T Department Deccan College of Engineering and Technology Hyderabad, India ameenayesha@gmail.com Khaleel Ur Rahman Khan Professor and Dean of Studies Ace Engineering College Hyderabad, India khaleelrkhan@gmail.com B.Padmaja Rani CSE Department JNTU Hyderabad, India Padmaja_jntuh@yahoo.co.in Abstract— the backbone of semantic web is ontology. In this paper we demonstrate the construction of ontology in education domain. We have constructed a course ontology which contains the complete details regarding various courses offered by the university. Course ontology can be used as a guide by the students for selecting a future course depending on their existing qualification. Course ontology is constructed using Protégé 4.0 alpha tool. Keywords- Semantic Web, Ontology, Protégé 4.0 I. INTRODUCTION Ontologies helps the process of analyzing, extracting, and integrating information on the web, making it easier for creation of solid knowledge bases that intelligent services can rely on to support user’s needs as in[1]. In this paper we have demonstrated a method of constructing ontology in education domain for the courses offered at the university using protégé tool. Existing university website does not take the semantic into context while displaying the courses offered. Creation of course ontology can be considered as the first step towards educational semantic web where the student will be allowed to choose a particular course only if the restrictions are satisfied. We can specify constraints for getting admitted to a particular course as restrictions ex. If a student has passed under graduation engineering course then he can get admitted to post graduate engineering. Course ontology can be implemented for a university. II. BACKGROUND In semantic web a variety of ontologies can exist for describing the same applications domain. Many ontologies are constructed for in education domain like EduOnto which is an Ontology for Educational Resources as in [2], and another ontology OntoEdu which is based on education grid system for e-learning as in [3].Most of the ontologies constructed in education domain are used for E-learning system but the ontology which we have constructed in this paper is used for guiding a student for selecting a particular course for his studies. III. COURSE ONTOLOGY The course ontology is created for all the courses offered at the university. The university offers several courses in the stream of arts, science, social science, management, commerce, engineering, education and law. The student can select any course depending on their eligibility i.e. if he has a graduation degree he can select any post-graduation course and if he has a post-graduation degree he can chose either a research course or Ph.D. depending on the stream. University conducts entrance test as an eligibility criteria for taking admission into under graduate engineering course and post graduate engineering course. A. Creation of Class Hierarchy The root of course ontology is CoursesOffered which is in turn divided into arts, science, social science, management, commerce, education, law, engineering which are further divided into undergraduate course, postgraduate course, research course, and Ph.D. courses. In order to make explicit that a student must choose only one course all subclasses of course are made disjoint. The OWL Viz representation of course ontology is shown in Fig.1. Figure 1. Owl Viz view of course ontology B. Properties We can define two types of properties in OWL. Object properties and data type properties. By using protégé we can also create third type of properties called as annotation properties as in [4]. 1) Object property Instances are related to one another by object properties. In the course ontology we have created five object properties as shown in Fig. 2. Figure 2.Object properties of course ontology 2012 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Technology for Education 978-0-7695-4759-6/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/T4E.2012.50 237