Ordinance ontology: ontology for representing ordinances issued by education federal institutions/Ordinance ontology: ontologia para representacao de portarias emitidas por instituicoes federais de ensino

Federal educational institutions in Brazil generate and publish a large number of electronic documents for most of the activities performed. There are several kinds of documents, each one with a purpose, and, among these kinds, ordinances are used to formalize administrative acts that define competencies and establish rules and procedures, among other finalities. To exemplify, in 2019, the Fluminense Federal Institute published around 2500 ordinances and these, as well as the other kinds of official documents, are published in plain text format, without any type of content structuring, which makes it impossible to perform refined queries based on the described content. To allow content structuring, the Semantic Web provides a set of technologies and standards necessary for representing information related to a given domain of knowledge. This formal representation is defined as ontology and it allows to describe objects and properties of a domain of knowledge, in addition to enabling inference of new knowledge based on pre-established axioms. This paper presents the development and validation of an ontology to describe ordinances published by federal educational institutions, in order to enable the structuring of the knowledge contained within these documents and, thus, to allow the use of this structured information to perform refined searches. It is also expected that this work provides a basis for the development of new ontologies, enabling descriptions of the other kinds of documents published by public educational institutions.