An Ontology for Social Determinants of Education (SDoEd) based on Human-AI Collaborative Approach

2025-01-17

AI Summary

Current educational research lacks a standardized, systematic framework for analyzing how social determinants of education (SDoE) influence student academic achievement. To address this gap, this study introduces the first standardized ontology of Social Determinants of Education (SDoEd), formally mapping students’ lived conditions to learning outcomes. Methodologically, we adopt a human-in-the-loop paradigm: leveraging ChatGPT-3.5 to support initial concept generation, followed by iterative expert review from education researchers and empirical validation against peer-reviewed literature; the ontology is formalized in OWL using Protégé. Rigorously evaluated via OntoMetric and peer review, the first release of SDoEd comprises 231 core concepts, 10 object properties, and 24 data properties. It balances theoretical soundness with practical applicability, establishing a reusable, interoperable knowledge infrastructure to advance research on educational equity and inform evidence-based policy interventions.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

The use of computational ontologies is well-established in the field of Medical Informatics. The topic of Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) has also received extensive attention. Work at the intersection of ontologies and SDoH has been published. However, a standardized framework for Social Determinants of Education (SDoEd) is lacking. In this paper, we are closing the gap by introducing an SDoEd ontology for creating a precise conceptualization of the interplay between life circumstances of students and their possible educational achievements. The ontology was developed utilizing suggestions from ChatGPT-3.5-010422 and validated using peer-reviewed research articles. The first version of developed ontology was evaluated by human experts in the field of education and validated using standard ontology evaluation software. This version of the SDoEd ontology contains 231 domain concepts, 10 object properties, and 24 data properties

Problem

• Education
• Social Determinants
• Learning Outcomes

Innovation

• SDoEd Ontology
• Computational Ontology
• AI-Assisted Education Research