Find a Research Collaborator: An Ontology-Based Solution to Find the Right Resources for Research Collaboration

Researchers in Higher Education (HE) institutions/academia and in industry are continuously engaged in generating new solutions and products for existing and emergent problems. Doing quality research and producing better scientific results depend greatly on solid research teams and scientific collaborators. Research output in HE institutions and industry can be optimized with appropriate resources in research teams and collaborations with suitable research partners. The main challenge in finding suitable resources for joint research projects and scientific collaborations pertains to the availability of data and metadata of researchers and their scientific work in traditional formats, for instance, websites, portals, documents, and traditional databases. However, these traditional data sources do not support intelligent and smart ways of finding and querying the right resources for joint research and scientific collaboration. A possible solution resides in the deployment of Semantic Web (SW) techniques and technologies for representing researcher and their research contribution data in a machine-understandable format, thus ultimately proving useful for smart and intelligent query-answering purposes. In pursuit of this, we present a general Methodology for Ontology Design and Development (MODD). We also describe the use of this methodology to design and develop Higher Education Ontology (HEO). This HEO can be used to automate various activities and processes in HE. In addition, we describe the use and adoption of the HEO through a case study on the topic of "finding the right resources for joint research and scientific collaboration". Finally, we provide an analysis and evaluation of our methodology for posing smart queries and evaluating the results based on machine reasoning.