Ontology Mapping

Project Output

Oct

2024

Over the past months, the QualityLink consortium has been working on a technical architecture for exchanging data on courses and micro-credentials. A standardised ontology will be at the heart of the proposed architecture. It will ensure semantic interoperability and serve as a “backbone” when aggregating and matching data from different sources.

The ontology will need to cover basic course data as well as the quality indicators to be addressed within the project. The project consortium looked into numerous existing data models and API specifications that standardise basic course data or quality in different ways. The following illustration and table provide an overview of the different domains covered by those:

Name	Description	Maintained by	Technical approach
European Learning Model (ELM)	Used in the context of the European Digital Credentials for Learning (EDC) or the Qualification Dataset Register (QDR).	European Commission, DG Employment	RDF ontology and application profiles
ELMO	Based on the CEN standard EN 15981-2011 EuroLMAI and used in Emrex.	Emrex	XML schema
EWP Courses API	Used in the Erasmus Without Papers network.	EWP consortium	XML schema
Open Course Catalogue API (OCCAPI	Inspired by the EWP APIs.	EUF	REST API + JSON schema
Open Education API (OOAPI)	Specification developed by Dutch HEIs and used in some European University alliances; some overlap/similarity to Edu-API, but covers additional domains.	SURF & Community	REST API + JSON schema
Edu-API	Candidate specification inspired by different existing 1EdTech standards.	1EdTech	REST API + JSON schema
Database of External Quality Assurance Results (DEQAR)	Aggregates standardised information on quality assurance results from European QA agencies.	EQAR	REST API + JSON schema
European Higher Education Sector Observatory (EHESO, previously ETER) & OrgReg	Maintains basic institutional descriptors and aggregates statistical data on HEIs from national sources.	EHESO consortium on behalf of European Commission	REST API + JSON schema
Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL)	Developed by a US-based think tank and used for its Credential Registry.	Credential Engine	RDF ontology

A detailed comparison how basic data and indicators are modelled by the most relevant existing standards is available in a separate spreadsheet. As part of the QualityLink work programme we will be proposing ontologies for those indicators that are not yet modelled by any existing standard.