Assessing the performance of educational institutions: A multidimensional approach

Academic units comprise multiple domains that influence their overall performance and synthesize their profile. In order to assist decision makers and examine the impact of the activities and the interactions of Higher Educational Institutions on the domains of which academia is consisted, multivariate rankings are utilized. Rankings can be used as a measure of the development of an academic unit in time and in relation to other academic units, as well as a guide for the strategic planning. Although, multifaceted information gives a clearer interpretation of the status of academic units and contributes to their development, it perplexes the decision making process by increasing its complexity. The paper describes a ranking methodology that considers the multidimensionality of academia, so as to offer a detailed comparison and assessment of educational institutions, but also alleviates the intricacy of multifaceted data by introducing semantic web technologies and visual analytics to the multiple criteria decision making process. The applicability of the methodology to the academic domain is ensured by the competency check, which is a set of requirements that should be satisfied by the domain. In this context, we present the Multidimensional Ontology Based Visual Ranking system, which builds upon the before mentioned methodology and proposes the use of ontologies for storing, managing and exploring the information and visual analytics for providing interactive presentation and insights on complex and voluminous data.