The Bowlogna ontology: Fostering open curricula and agile knowledge bases for Europe's higher education landscape

The Bologna Process initiated a radical change within higher education institutions. This change triggered the creation of new administrative procedures in the every day life of European universities. It also gave rise to the emergence of new concepts for the description of curricula. It is critical for the successful continuation of this process to support the publication and exchange of information among universities. With this aim in mind, we created the Bowlogna Ontology to model an academic setting as proposed by the Bologna reform. In this paper, we present our efforts to design this ontology and the entire process that lead to its creation starting from the definition of a linguistic lexicon derived from the Bologna reform and its conversion to a formal ontology. We also describe practical applications of our ontology for end-users at universities (such as a faceted search and browsing system for course information).