Masterarbeit
Ontology Creation with Standard Vocabularies: Foundations and Implementation
Research Area
Advisers
Sandra Schaftner M.Sc.
Description
Modern research infrastructures are fundamentally challenged by isolated data silos, which severely restrict seamless knowledge exchange and interoperability between university systems. The Across Alliance is committed to creating a robust Federated Knowledge Graph (KG) to overcome this fragmentation and support cross-border education and research. Achieving this goal requires a strong semantic foundation based on globally recognized standards.
This thesis focuses on the crucial task of establishing semantic interoperability for the existing Across KG by aligning it with essential external standard vocabularies and ontologies. This includes foundational frameworks such as the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) for philosophical grounding, interoperability standards like OpenAIRE for integration into the European Open Science Cloud ecosystem, and core national metadata standards such as the Kerndatensatz Forschung (KDFS). The research will explore existing approaches for extending or modifying an existing ontology to achieve conformance with these standards. Furthermore, the thesis should investigate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for systematic ontology matching. The core objective is to select, analyze, and systematically map the existing Across ontology to several appropriate standard vocabularies, not limited to the examples mentioned.
