This article is dedicated to the development of a model for competencies within an educational program and its implementation through the use of semantic technologies. The model proposed by the authors is distinctive in that competencies are organized into a hierarchical data structure with arbitrary levels of nesting. Furthermore, the article presents an original solution for modelling the input requirements for studying a course, which is defined in the form of dependencies between the competencies generated by the course and the competencies of other courses. The outcome of this work is an ontological model of a competency-based curriculum, for which the authors have developed and implemented algorithms for data addition and retrieval, as well as for analyzing the consistency of the curriculum in terms of the input requirements for studying a discipline and the learning outcomes from previous periods. The findings presented in the article will prove to be valuable in the development of educational process management information systems and educational program constructors. They will also be instrumental in aligning diverse educational programs within the context of academic mobility.
The article presents the results of the application of an ontological approach to the description of the structure and content of the educational programme, and its subsequent analysis for the consistency of prerequisites and learning outcomes of courses. The practical result of the work is an ontology approach implemented in the Protégé 5.5.0 editor, which reflects the studied disciplines in terms of the skills they form and the entrance requirements (prerequisites) for the qualification of the student. The curriculum model includes sequences of semesters and courses of study (academic year) related by time relationships. The developed ontology approach is filled with data from the educational programme “Software Engineering”. The authors have earned queries in DL Query and SPARQL languages, which, using logical inference procedures, make it possible to analyse an educational programme for consistency of disciplines in terms of input requirements and the skills of the learner formed during the training period. The developed ontology and rules of logical inference can be used as a part of the educational process management information systems and educational programme designers, for the intellectual analysis of programme integrity and the consistency of learning prerequisites and outcomes in disciplines.