Abstract
The South African government established the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) to help underprivileged families with finances to access higher education. NSFAS and partner institutions run heterogeneous systems and use different processes and data representations for students and funding operations; which create duplications and inconsistencies in the data, resulting in errors and delays in the approval of students’ applications and disbursement of funds. To address these challenges, this study developed an ontology of NSFAS operations, namely, NSFASonto. The resulting NSFASonto ontology was evaluated for reasoning and consistency with the HermiT reasoner and SPARQL queries within Protégé and displayed promising results. The NSFASonto ontology can be leveraged in web-based applications to integrate the NSFAS operations with partner institutions for efficient approval and delivery of financial aid to students across South Africa. Furthermore, the NSFASonto ontology could be reused in other countries to build automated systems for student financial aid operations/processes.
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Luchman, S., Mundell, D., Perumal, A., Fonou-Dombeu, J.V. (2023). NSFASonto: An Ontology for South African National Student Financial Aid Scheme Operations. In: Kö, A., Francesconi, E., Asemi, A., Kotsis, G., Tjoa, A.M., Khalil, I. (eds) Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective. EGOVIS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14149. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39841-4_1
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