Process of Building Reference Ontology for Higher Education

Most ontologies are application ontologies, that are not reusable and are difficult to link together as they are too specific. Reference ontology is able to contribute significantly in reducing the issue of ontology applications specificity. Particularly considering higher education domain, we think that a reference ontology dedicated to this knowledge area, can be regarded as a valuable tool for several stakeholders interested in analyzing the system of higher education as a whole, especially in a context of academic systems diversity all over the world. Motivated by this potential application and even more, we decided to build a reference ontology called HERO ontology, which stands for “Higher Education Reference Ontology”. In this paper we explain HERO ontology building process from requirements specification until ontology evaluation using NeOn methodology.