A semantic approach to expert system for e-Assessment of credentials and competencies

The Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) is a labor-intensive process for academic advisors, evaluation services, graduate schools, registrars, learners, and other individuals and organizations responsible for assessment of learner’s credentials and competencies with the purpose of continuing (lifelong) learning. The present paper describes an approach to build an expert system for electronic assessment (e-Assessment) of academic credentials and competencies, which is an e-Learning application intended to essentially help assessors to conduct their work more effective and efficient. The proposed approach uses the semantic web technologies, such as RDFS ontologies and POSL rules to convert academic credentials between educational institutions and make correspondences between the learner’s competencies and credentials.