Developing an Ontology for Academic Disciplines. Stage I: Establishing the Reference Model

This project aims at developing an ontology for the whole domain of academic disciplines, closing thereby a significant gap in the area of knowledge management. The ontology will allow to represent the multi-faceted relations between disciplines as a semantic network. This will enable to render complex relationships between fields or clusters of study from synchronical and diachronical perspectives in a concise and intuitive way. In the first stage an abstract reference model, applicable for the description of relationship structures of academic disciplines, will be developed. This reference model will serve as a basis for building respective ontologies, which can be employed for the development of applications for data structuring and data exchange.