An Approach to Creating Domain Ontologies for Higher Education in Economics

Owing to development of ICT, knowledge representation and possibilities of its usage, sharing, storing and reusing, increasingly rely on ontologies as formal representation of (knowledge) conceptualization in different domain. Economics being the widest area of human personal and organizational activity as well as countless (structured and unstructured) data has no unified upper ontology and taxonomy. Economic curricula on faculties of economic in the Republic of Croatia reflect the problem of taxonomic shortcomings in economics as academic discipline. Numerous courses in economic curricula show the trends to specialization of economic knowledge but that also point out on decreasing capabilities of complex problem solving. The main idea in this paper is to research and define appropriate approach to ontology development useful for: - representing the institutionl economic curricula which can serve to potential students in making the choice of their desirable courses, - representing academic discipline, - documenting the data, -creating meta data about learning and management systems . The approch will will be based on multiphase process of ontology creation and multilevel approach to common vocabulary creation and it will be tested on faculties of economics at universities in Croatia.