International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),

Vol. 14, No. 3, March 2016

A Framework for Building Ontology in Education

Domain for Knowledge Representation
Monica Sankat #1, R S thakur*2, Shailesh Jaloree #3
#

Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Application, SATI

Vidisha, India

Department of Computer Application, MANIT

Bhopal, India

AbstractIn this paper we have proposed a method of creating domain ontology using protg tool. Existing ontology does not take
the semantic into context while displaying the information about different modules. This paper proposed a methodology for the
derivation and implementation of ontology in education domain using protg 4.3.0 tool.

I. INTRODUCTION
There is large amount of data available on net, which is
dispersed, superfluous and inaccurate by nature, makes use of
the information difficult. This problem is often referred to as
Information overload. Existing technologies lack ability to
perform significant analysis and filtering of data, there by
presenting results that only human can process and not
machine.
The purpose of semantic web idea was to provide
meaningful web that can be processed by machines and
humans equally [1]. The web can review the intent of user and
provide results that fulfil the information requirement. Since,
there is a prospective to create diverse ontologies on a same
domain as no common criteria exist for building ontologies.
This paper presents a methodology for the derivation and
implementation of ontology in education domain. The key
concepts of the domain with its data properties have been
discussed. Model is implemented in using protg 4.3.0. This
paper covers the major aspects of Education domain including
super class and subclass hierarchy, creating a subclass
instances for class diagram, properties and their relations etc.

II. RELATED WORK

WebODE [2] is an advanced ontological engineering
workbench that provides varied ontology related services, and
gives assistance to most of the activities involved in the
development of ontology.
Ontology pruning is to build a domain ontology based on
different heterogeneous sources. It has the following steps.
First, for the domain-specific ontology, core ontology is used
as a top level organization. Second, a dictionary is used to
acquire domain concepts. Third, concepts that were not
domain specific are removed by domain specific corpora of
texts [3].

https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3154033

Protg [4] is probably the most popular ontology

development tool. Protg is a free, Java-based open source
ontology editor. Protg offers two approaches for the
modelling of ontologies: a traditional frame-based approach
(via Protg-Frame) and a modelling approach using OWL
(via Protg-OWL). Protg ontologies can be stored in a
variety of different formats, including RDF/RDFS, OWL and
XML Schema formats.
Arabshian [5] in his paper propose LexOnt; a semiautomatic ontology creation tool for a high-level ontology.
LexOnt explores Web directory as corpus, although it can
evolve to use other corpora as well.
LexOnt [6] is developed as a Protege plug-in .The GUI
design and implementation of LexOnt. LexOnt is built
specifically for those who are not experts within a domain, but
for users who want to recognize the domain on a high-level
and create an ontology that describes it.
Boyce [7] presented a method for domain experts to
develop ontologies for use in the delivery of courseware
content. They focused in particular on relationship types that
allow us to represent rich domains sufficiently.
Fortuna [8] proposed a semi-automatic and data-driven
ontology editor called OntoGen, focusing on editing of topic
ontologies .The system combines text data mining techniques
with an efficient user interface to decrease the time spent and
complexity.
Fortuna [9] presents a new version of OntoGen system. The
system integrates machine learning and text data mining
algorithms into an efficient user interface making ease of use
for users who are not ontology engineers.
Mei-ying Jia et al. [10] has proposed automated ontology
construction method. The method is not pure auto-mated. It
uses existing thesaurus and database of Military Intelligence.
The thesaurus provides classes information for the ontology
and the database provides the instances. Here, only three types
of relationships are used between concepts of constructed
ontology.

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International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),

Vol. 14, No. 3, March 2016

There are not integrated methods and tools that

combine different techniques and diverse knowledge
sources with existing ontologies to accelerate the
development process and these methods are not
generalized to other domains [11].
They only provide some specialized relationships
among the concepts. Again these relationships are
not adequate to describe knowledge constitute of
education domain [15].
Doesnt provide Easy interface for domain experts
having little technological expertise.

Bhowmick [11] present a framework for manual ontology

engineering in education domain for managing learning
content of the syllabus related requirements of school students.
In this paper, a multilingual framework for management of
knowledge structures of such domains.
To reduce the effort of manual ontology building,
Choudhary propose a methodology for building ontology in
semi-automatic manner. In his paper algorithms are developed
for automatic discovery of concepts from Web for building
domain ontology. Relationships among the concepts are
assigned in semi-automated manner [12].
Navigli [13] in his paper presented a methodology for
automatic ontology enrichment and document explanation
with concepts and relations of an existing ontology. They
defined Natural language definitions from available
taxonomies in a given domain are processed. These regular
expressions are useful to identify general-purpose and
domain-specific relations.

IV. MOTIVATION
The specific features of this domain are: Every concept refers to a semantically distinct entity.
The concepts in a domain are related to each other
through different relationships.
Different types of relationships may exist and the
same concept can be represented by different words.
The phenomenon of synonymy is very common. So
the same concept may be referred to by several terms.
For example, the terms DM and Data Model refers to
the same concept.

III. THE DOMAIN ONTOLOGY PROBLEM

The nature of ontology changes domain to domain. Steps
will be taken up into concern for building ontology for
Education domain, same steps likely would not consider for
structure ontology for some other domain like education,
finance, health care etc because the nature of domain in some
cases top to bottom or vice versa. The main drawbacks in
existing work in this area are:-

Following Fig.1. Shows the Domain Ontology taxonomy:

Fig .1: Data Model Taxonomy

V. PROPOSED WORK
The main initiative in this paper is to research and characterize
appropriate approach to ontology development. Analysing the
specific features of the domain, it is identified that
requirements for representing the domain knowledge are as
follows: Representing the Educational domain which can
serve to potential students in making the choice of
their desirable Concepts.
Creating Meta data about Educational systems.

https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3154033

Reducing the Redundancy occurring due to the

synonymous ambiguity between the terms to find
information at the concept level is very significant
Different types of relationships may be used in many
ways in systems that make use of the domain
knowledge.
VI. ONTOLOGY BUILDING METHOD
Building domain-specific ontologies is an expensive
construction task. This approach is to develop domain
ontology for educational data. Ontology is built in this step by

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International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),

Vol. 14, No. 3, March 2016

linking concepts and relations extracted. The proposed work

will focus on relationship types that allow us to model rich
domains effectively. The method used to build Ontology is
shown in Fig.1.
A. Acquirement of Ontology using Text mining
Text mining, also known as Intelligent Text Analysis, Text
Data mining is a process of extracting interesting and nontrivial information and knowledge from unstructured text [14].
Knowledge may be discovered from many sources of
information but there are many unstructured texts remain as
largest source of knowledge. The problem of Text Data
Mining is to acquire implicit and explicit concepts and
semantic relations between concepts using Natural Language
Processing (NLP) techniques.
B. Filtering of Domain Ontology
The next step is to convert the collected text documents (in
unstructured form) to a structured .Parsing is the first step in
converting unstructured text to the structured format for ease
of analysis. Typically, this process involves tokenization,

normalization of tokens (lemmatization or stemming), Part

of-speech (POS) tagging and so on [10].
C. Extraction of concepts
In this step, concepts i.e. domain oriented terms are
extracted. For example, Object, Attributes, Entities and Data
models. Occurrences of Term and their Word Count is also
calculated i.e. Occurrence of Term Data models in
following sentence, Object based data models has concepts
such as entities, attributes, and relationships is 1 and its Word
Count is 2.
D. Identification of Relationship among the concept
For the topic of data Model in the education domain in
which most relationships between the concepts is shown by
is-a relationship, there are some relationships between
concepts that which are not generalization or specialization
relationship types and hence if the is-a relationship was used,
the relationships would be misinterpreted. Hence in Data
Model Ontology, a number of other relationship types were
created and defined such as Has_Part, Has_Subtype.

Fig .2: Ontology Building Framework

VII.

IMPLEMENTING THE EDUCATIONAL ONTOLOGY WITH

PROTG 4.3.0

In order to implement the ontology, we chose Protg 4.3.0

because of the fact that it is extensible and provides a user
friendly environment. In the following section ontology
Classes, their Object properties and their Disjoint Classes are
shown.

https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3154033

A. Classes and class hierarchy

The first step was to give the Data model related classes
or concepts. Further the concepts are mainly divided into
Physical, Object based and Record based, as shown in Fig. 3.
B. Disjoint Classes
If classes cannot have any common instances they are called
Disjoint Classes. Disjoint classes for Data Model ontology
are shown in Fig. 4.

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International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS),

Vol. 14, No. 3, March 2016

C. Object properties of ontology

Object properties for representing the relationships which
we want to add among classes are shown in Fig. 5

Fig.4: Disjoint Classes in Protg 4.3.0

Fig.3: Class Hierarchy Representation of Data Model

Fig .5: Object Properties in Protg 4.3.0

VIII.
VISUALIZATION OF ONTOLOGY
The final process that generates an ontology as the
knowledge representation is shown in Fig 6 .In this ontology

we add important classes and subclasses of Data model

Ontology as shown in Fig. 6.

IX. CONCLUSION
This paper details the steps that transform taxonomy into a
domain concept and explains how this structure is transformed
into more formal domain ontology. We would like to realize
the generation of more complex concepts that exploit the
existing ontology concept as well as available ontologies to
fulfill Educational objective.

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Fig.6: Visualization of Ontology

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