Ontology-Based System for Educational Program Counseling

Choosing the right university program can be very challenging for students. This is especially the case in developing countries such as India and Pakistan, where university admission depends on not only the program of interest but also other factors such as the candidate's financial standing. Since information on the Internet can be highly scattered, university candidates often need counseling from qualified people to decide their educational programs. Traditional database systems cannot effectively organize the large unstructured data related to university programs. It is challenging, then, for prospective students to acquire the information needed to make good decisions to consider factors such as personal preferences, available options, and the job market. This study proposes an integrated framework that takes advantage of the latest ontology-based semantic technologies. The proposed system can efficiently extract user-specific constraints in unambiguous queries and then retrieve more precise information. The system uses Web sources to ingest the right information and then extract explicit and implicit knowledge about educational domains and related university offerings. We believe the proposed system can effectively and efficiently choose an educational program by incorporating user constraints.