Development of tools for automatic comparison of curricula is of special interest and importance in the context of creation of open and dynamic European educational area as they have potential to promote constructive and continuous improvement of study programmes of different educational institutions and their harmonization with requirements of the labor market and international trends in corresponding sectors of economy, which, in its turn, can raise quality of education in general and facilitate student mobility in particular. The authors of the paper have developed an approach that allows comparison of study programmes in automatic way by performing four steps: representation of curricula in the form of concept maps, transformation of the concept maps into ontologies, matching of the ontologies acquired, and visualization of comparison results. The paper presents the first two steps of the approach and discusses the main concepts (concept map and ontology), related works, a general structure of a concept map for a study programme, process for construction of a curriculum concept map, correspondence between elements of concept maps and entities of ontologies, as well as an algorithm for transformation of a concept map into an ontology. Illustrative figures are included in order to show the conceptual structure of concept maps for representation of curricula, a fragment of the created concept map, steps of the approach proposed, and an example of an ontology acquired. At the end of the paper, main activities of future work are specified paying attention to the last two steps of the approach: matching of ontologies and visualization of results.