An ontology engineering approach to measuring city education system performance

•Identifies educational knowledge and data required by ISO 37,120 educational city indicators.•Defines an ontology for representing education knowledge and data required by indicators.•Precisely represents education indicator definitions using the ontology.•Precisely represents city’s educational indicators and supporting data used to derive them.•Provides a standard for publishing educational indicator knowledge and data on the Semantic Web.•Describes an intelligent agent for performing definition, longitudinal and transversal analysis. This paper addresses the problem of how to represent education system measurement definitions and the data used to derive them. ISO 37120 is standard for measuring city performance. It defines 100 indicators of which seven focus on Education. As cities adopt the standard and begin publishing their indicator values, citizens, city bureaucrats and politicians will be able to see how well their education systems perform relative to other cities. Hence, education systems will be subject to greater scrutiny and will have to provide evidence-based explanations for their performance. In order to enable the automated analysis of city performance, four problems must be solved: 1) how are indicator definitions represented? 2) how is the data used to derive an indicator value represented? 3) how is educational system specific knowledge represented, and 4) how is city specific educational system knowledge represented? In this paper we present an Education Ontology designed to represent ISO 37120 education indicators and the information delineated above. The ontology is designed to enable an intelligent agent to perform consistency and root cause analysis of city indicators. It can also be used by cities to publish their education indicators and data, using Semantic Web standards, on their Open Data portals.