Monitoring Conformance to the Internal Regulation of an MSc Course using Ontologies and Rules

G. Papadopoulos, N. Bassiliades, “Monitoring Conformance to the Internal Regulation of an MSc Course using Ontologies and Rules”, Proc. 2nd International Conference on Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective (EGOVIS'11), Kim Normann Andersen, Enrico Francesconi, Ake Gronlund and Tom M. van Engers (Eds.), Springer, LNCS 6866, p

The representation of information in the Web today is mainly through natural language and its meaning is only interpretable to users who have studied understand the specific natural language. Thus, in the case of the Internal Regulation (IR) of an MSc course of a Greek State University in order to extract an (indispensable) conclusion, one must understand the Greek language, must comprehend the content of the regulation and finally must combine information maybe from many disparate parts of the corpus. For example, if a candidate post-graduate student wanted to know if and how he can attend these courses he should consider all the articles of the IR to find the answer to this question. On the other hand, a computer program could not draw such a conclusion using natural language text. To solve problems of this nature one can use the technologies of the Semantic Web. This paper presents the development of a system that gives solution to these issues, based on Semantic Wed mechanisms, such as ontologies in OWL and rule in SWRL.