EFRO is designed to model funding rules, monitoring activities, and evidencing requirements based on the UK Department for Education’s guidance. EFRO addresses the gap in current education ontologies, which lack support for funding compliance. It enables automated reasoning and compliance checking through SPARQL queries. The ontology is evaluated using real-world competency questions and aims to support education providers in managing complex and evolving funding regulations.
EFRO addresses challenges in educational compliance management through formal representation of funding regulations. Based on analysing regulatory complexities and administrative burdens education providers face, we present this ontology for machine-readable modelling of funding rules, evidence requirements, and monitoring processes. EFRO goes beyond existing educational ontologies by specifically representing funding regulations at both procedural and evidential levels to aid compliance verification. The ontology adheres to FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), enabling semantic interoperability and supporting automated compliance verification through SPARQL queries while providing a factual foundation to enhance AI-based regulatory systems.
| Resource | Link |
|---|---|
| 🔗 RDF/OWL Ontology | EFRO.rdf |
| 🔗 RDF/OWL Individuals | EFRO_individuals.rdf |
| 📖 HTML Documentation | View Docs |
| 🧪 Competency Questions | Competency_Questions |
| 📄 License (CC BY 4.0) | View License |
Umair Arshad et al., “EFRO: An Ontology for Education Funding Compliance,” submitted to ISWC 2025.
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/RGU-Computing/EFRO