Towards Information Management System for Licensing in Higher Education: An Ontology-Based Approach

Abstract

Higher education licensing, i.e. the process of granting permissions to provide certain educational services, is an important process of public administration. Governmental bodies handle licensing requests submitted by education providers regularly. Such requests are supplemented with large amounts of information that demonstrates the actual situation in an education provider. At present this process is paper based and involves a lot of manual labor. This situation is similar for other types of education, e.g. primary and secondary, as well as for many countries. We, therefore, aim to computerize this process by creating a universal licensing information system (LIS). We base our approach on a domain ontology that defines the main concepts in the licensing process. In this paper we show how licensing process works now and propose the ways to make it more efficient. Then, we envisage the usage models of LIS, identify its main business actors and use cases, and provide a high-level architecture of the system. Finally, we present a fragment of the domain ontology in higher education domain.