An Ontology-Based Approach for Curriculum Mapping in Higher Education

Programs offered by academic institutions in higher education need to meet specific standards that are established by the appropriate accreditation bodies. Curriculum mapping is an important part of the curriculum management process that is used to document the expected learning outcomes, ensure quality, and align programs and courses with industry standards. Semantic web languages can be used to express and share common agreement about the vocabularies used in the domain under study. In this paper, we present an approach based on ontology for curriculum mapping in higher education. Our proposed approach is focused on the creation of a core curriculum ontology that can support effective knowledge representation and knowledge discovery. The research work presents the case of ontology reuse through the extension of the curriculum ontology to support the creation of micro-credentials. We also present a conceptual framework for knowledge discovery to support various business use case scenarios based on ontology inferencing and querying operations.