Faculty performance evaluation system: An ontological approach

Abstract

Performance evaluation of faculty members in a higher education is a serious challenge for management. Several qualitative and quantitative factors are considered leading to targeted professional growth of an organization to evaluate the performance, such as acquiring research grants, research profile, student evaluation, publications, academic responsibilities etc. However, to quantify such information is a difficult task. Usually standard “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) are used to evaluate bare level workload of a faculty, however gauging quality always remain a challenge. In this paper, we propose an ontology based faculty performance evaluation system where the ontology is used to conceptualize the qualitative factors of the faculty as well as the set of rules that together make a system. The Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used to represent rules in ontology and built-in reasoning support help to deduce new knowledge. The presented work has been tested by applying it on real data set of a Public Sector University in Pakistan, and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed system. It must be mentioned that the use of ontology makes the system easily modifiable due to the availability of the sophisticated ontology editors and APIs as well as provides complete automatic system.