Abstract:

Capturing all the research and educational activities that happen within a university is of vital importance in order to extract insights for the academic performance and the academic collaboration. It must be mentioned that both education and research are key indicators for quality assurance in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Links between education and research in Higher Education Institutions must be also revealed. The representation of the research activities and collaborations in academic institutions has been a topic of interest in many studies. However, little work has been done in depicting the educational activities and collaborations, in capturing the associations between education and research, as well as in dealing with the academic activity as a whole.

In this paper, we present AcademIS, an academic information system for education and research management that facilitates academic networking. The information of the academic activity is presented in a unified and comparable manner, due to the use of ontologies and linked data. Visualizations and visual analytics of the linked data are then used to retrieve answers to meaningful questions in the context of a decision support environment.

So as to capture all the information, there is the need to aggregate all the available resources and the relevant records from the various sources, most of which contain the information in relational databases. The goal is to implement an information system for both academic and research records and to accumulate all the already existing data, as well as to integrate the related information for the research (retrieved by publication databases and the already existing information system IREMA) and the education (accessed from university records).

The approach that we follow is the creation and the use of an information system for the LODification of conventional information from traditional relational databases. This information system uses the AcademIS ontology, which is based on the renowned VIVO ontology. The AcademIS ontology extends the VIVO to also include the educational information about the activities and the collaborations in the academic setting.

Keywords:

Linked data, semantic web, ontology, academic information system, research management.