APPLYING SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES IN EVALUATION OF ACADEMIC DATA: THE CASE STUDY OF MEDICAL SCHOOL, ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI

It is essential for Departments and Schools to evaluate their overall performance at least on an annual basis. Significant efforts are required for collecting, processing and presenting the large amount of related data. In this paper we describe the design, development and implementation of an online evaluation system for the Medical School of Aristotle University at Thessaloniki. It was the scope of this study to point out many of the issues being raised during such an attempt and provide resolutions to the encountered problems. Although all necessary information was present in the database, current technology cannot empower machines with the ability to understand, share and reason with it at execution time. Traditional web 2.0 applications, which used to perform the majority of the process, were incapable of solving the emerging problems. A new decentralized web framework, based on semantic technologies, has been incorporated as a remedy for the current limitations. More specifically, linked data technologies were utilized in concert with metadata descriptions of the required inputs, so as to account for the interoperability of data their sharing with potential applications and future extensions.