Creating the Context for Exploiting Linked Open Data in Multidimensional Academic Ranking

Academia is a complex socio-technical system with multiple aspects and constituents that involve various stakeholders. In order to address stakeholders’ needs and to assist the institutional accountability, this complexity should be considered during the development of academic services. We have designed a dynamic multidimensional ranking approach, easily modifiable to address user requirements, so as to assess and compare the university performance with a clear view to the support of effective institutional strategic planning and policy making. Our approach comprises the following components: the AcademIS ontology to model the academic domain and its multiple dimensions, the AcademIS Information System to manage and display the academic information, published in Linked Open Data format and the visual-aided Multiple Criteria Decision Making component, to evaluate and rank the performance of the academic units. The data are aggregated from several sources, in different formats, LODified by our system, and presented to the user by the interface to ultimately assist the decision making process.