An Ontology for School Curricula in Germany
School curricula are a central steering instrument of the education system. They define which competencies and learning content students are expected to acquire in specific subjects, grades, school types, and educational pathways. At the same time, curricula differ significantly across German federal states in structure, terminology, and level of detail.
The Lehrplan Ontology provides a formal, machine-readable knowledge representation of curricula used in general education schools in Germany. Its goal is to model curricular structures in a consistent and comparable way and to make them usable for digital, data-driven applications.
The Lehrplan Ontology aims to semantically model curricula for general education schools in primary and secondary education. This includes, among others:
- core curricula, framework curricula, and subject-specific curricula,
- competency descriptions and learning content,
- structural elements such as subjects, grades, school types, educational pathways, and qualification levels,
- federal-state-specific curriculum models and terminologies.
By formalizing these elements and their relationships, the ontology enables:
- cross-state comparability of curricula,
- structured querying and analysis (e.g. via SPARQL),
- integration with educational platforms and knowledge graphs,
- long-term maintainability and versioning of curriculum data.
Out of scope: Vocational education and training and special-needs education are currently not covered. The ontology does not model direct links to educational media or learning resources.
The Lehrplan Ontology follows a modular design:
- A core ontology defines concepts and relations that are common across all federal states.
- State-specific ontologies model the concrete curricula of individual states, preserving their original terminology and structure.
- State ontologies are linked to the core ontology to enable comparison and joint querying without forcing uniformity.
This approach allows federal states to maintain and evolve their curriculum models independently while remaining interoperable within a shared semantic framework.
├── docs/ – Generated ontology documentation (under development)
├── shapes/ – SHACL shapes for validation
├── src/ – Source files for ontology development
├── lp-full.owl/ttl – Full ontology variant
├── lp-base.owl/ttl – Base ontology variant
├── lp-simple.owl/ttl – Simple ontology variant
├── lp.owl/ttl – Latest stable ontology (basically the same like lp-full.owl)
├── reasoned.ttl – Full ontology with inferred triples
├── lp-land-*.owl – State-specific curriculum ontologies
└── README.md - this file
This ontology repository was created using the Ontology Development Kit (ODK).
Human-readable documentation (including class hierarchies, properties, and examples) is generated from the ontology sources and published in the docs/ directory.
You can access it here:
https://fwu-de.github.io/lehrplan-ontologie/docs
A complete list of ontology classes generated with Widoco is available here:
https://fwu-de.github.io/lehrplan-ontologie/
Additional materials and examples, including SPARQL queries, are available in related repositories such as:
- SPARQL notebooks: https://github.com/FWU-DE/mem-sparql-notebooks
- Subject ontology: https://github.com/FWU-DE/schulfach-ontologie
- School Type ontology: https://github.com/FWU-DE/schulart-ontologie
- SKOS vocabularies: https://fwu-de.github.io/mem-skos-vocabs/
Please use this GitHub repository’s issue tracker to request new terms or classes, or to report errors and other ontology-related concerns.
If you are interested in collaboration or would like to get in touch with us, please contact redaktion@mem.schule.