Nowadays information flow overload is typical for most of the companies, universities as knowledge organizations are not the exception. Little emphasis is placed on knowledge transfer efforts made by universities in passing knowledge to internal stakeholders (Chugh, 2013). The paper describes a sketch of a knowledge base for university research. The case of Graduate School of Management St. Petersburg State University is taken into consideration. The knowledge base in the form of ontology helps to create a big picture view of the different information pieces involved into research and improve understanding of research in general as well as its various research aspects (Gruber, 1993; Hahn, Chang, Kim & Kittur, 2016; Hammar, 2017). This paper is consistent with design science research and systems thinking applied for generalization of the selected research domain (Dresch, Lacerda & Antunes, 2015). It is based on literature review, the systemic analysis of knowledge portals of several universities as well as semantic analysis and in-depth interviews. The paper is focused on the ontology development for research domain so methods of ontological engineering are used. The study considers knowledge base and ontology from knowledge management perspective. According to Ameen et al. (2012) the university ontology generally portrays an institution, representing the local reality of the entire educational process. The knowledge base in the form of ontology is designed considering various aspects: organizational structure, research activities and workflow processes, including administrative structures, research results and their dissemination. The analysis of knowledge bases and literature review showed that existing university knowledge bases serve more like digital repositories (Koperwas, Skonieczny, Rybiński & Struk, 2013). But there is no survey devoted to university research domain. This research fills the gap.Proposed knowledge base is linked to the existing Pure Cloud Information System developed for a very specific application being a digital repository. The sketch of ontology of a knowledge base creates a big picture of decomposed comprehensive research aspects and tasks and their relationships; and allows the research data to be aggregated, filtered and delivered in a user-friendly way to the faculty and administrative staff. Presented sketch of ontology of a knowledge base for university research may help researchers, managers and knowledge analysts to develop a big picture view, improve the navigation among different knowledge assets. The paper considers the feasibility of using the ontology for research data integration from relational databases and other information sources.