The goal of this research is to create a reference data model for educational and research institutes of Iran Ministry of Sciences, Research, and Technology. After investigating existing technologies and considering the problem context, ontology was chosen as the data model format. In order to create the target ontology, an ontology construction methodology was designed and implemented. This methodology is created using design science research method and contains an architecture, a detailed workflow process, a guideline for performing each step, and related software tools in an integrated web-based system. The designed system is implemented in PHP and is available as open source. The system is used as the main tool to construct the target ontology. The proposed methodology leverages the three main knowledge sources including textual documents, existing ontologies in the higher education domain, and reverse engineering of a relational database of an integrated university system. The resulted product of this methodology was evaluated based on the data requirements of the Ministry of Sciences, Research, and Technology, and its shortcomings were resolved. The novelty of this work is both on the generated product, i.e., a localized reference data model, and an ontology construction methodology.

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