Use of ontologies and the semantic web for qualifications framework transparency

The problem of correlating and comparing the levels of the European and national qualifications framework and the potential of the Semantic Web technologies for solving this problem were explored. We substantiated the need for creating models and methods, aimed at providing transparency of the European and national qualifications frameworks and the development of tools for implementing these methods.
Authors proposed a reference model of the qualifications frame-work that formalizes knowledge of basic information objects relating to learning outcomes and their epresentation in the qualifications frameworks. The specific feature of this model implies using atomic competencies: semantics of information objects of different classes is formalized through the set of such atomic competences that are associated with different properties of these objects. This should provide for the automatic matching of these information objects on the level of knowledge. The methods of quantitative estimation of semantic proximity between information objects of different classes of ontological models, which corresponds to different problems, are proposed in the work. This allows identifying a similarity between learning outcomes, which are described with the use of descriptors of different qualification frameworks.
Information regarding atomic competences is obtained from the national and European standards, qualifications frameworks, spe-ciality descriptions, etc. They may be automatically supplemented via analysis of relevant information of Web-resources that contain semantic markup.
The work considers in detail the mechanism of integration of the reference information model of competences with technological en-vironment Semantic MediaWiki: ontological concepts and relations are used for semantic markup of Wiki-pages by categories and se-mantic properties. This allows running a variety of semantic queries to the content of pages, relating to learning outcomes. Examples of such queries are given and their expressive power is analyzed.
An example of using the ontological model of competences for improving semantic Web-search for the information for the purpose of supplementing and updating Wiki-pages was studied. The ontol-ogy potential in specification of information needs and the increased intersection of the obtained results is demonstrated with the ex-ample of the semantic search engine MAIPS.
Keywords: qualifications framework, ontology of competences, Wiki, semantic markup, semantic search.