Creating and Using an Education Standards Ontology to Improve Education

Abstract

We present an education standards ontology that has the potential for simplifying lesson planning for teachers, providing support for students by linking relevant resources, and providing a potential terminology for use in a lingua-franca for communicating with multiple communities about education components. We address the United Nations sustainable development goals concerned with education, with the support of semantic technologies. The goals of ensuring that all children graduate from primary and secondary schools and ensuring literacy and numeracy are our targets. We have created an education standards ontology along with a methodology for automatically generating this ontology. In this submission, we review literature related to educational applications that use semantic technologies and describe a web scraping method that we designed and used to automatically generate an education standards ontology. We also describe some potential uses of this ontology to assist in the UN education goals and reflect on next steps on uses of these existing educational resources to aide in improving literacy and numeracy in students and enabling future potential services and impact for an Educational Semantic Web.