Integrated Semantic-Based Composition of Skills and Learning Needs in Knowledge-Intensive Organisations

Holding and creating competences is one of the most strategic activities in organizations, especially in knowledge intensive ones. An organization dealing with a task to perform will firstly check for the required skills among the available personnel. If such a search process leads to discover lacking competencies, organizations may hire external personnel or encourage internal personnel to learn new competencies on the unavailable skills. The current availability of several, well-organized, e-learning modules, makes such possibility appealing and enonomically advantageous. A skill management system performing both the processes of searching among available skills and facilitating the creation of missing ones can hence be a noteworthy source of competitive advantage for a knowledge-intensive organization. We present here an approach and a system for such purpose, which exploits recent advances in semantic-based inference services and technologies.The proposed approach employs Description Logics formalism and reasoning services and is fully in the Semantic Web initiative mainstream.

Ontology-Based Approach to Formalization of Competencies

Competency-based learning has been used in training employees to acquire the necessary skills for an organization to be successful in dynamic and ever-changing environment. One of the core activities in competency-based training is learning material acquisition. Standardization efforts have made the retrieval of educational materials, also called learning objects, easier by describing them in pre-defined metadata schema. However, the existing standardized metadata schema and practices of learning object metadata annotation do not support automatic selection of resources by specific competency requirements in the competency-based learning. We propose an ontology-based competency formalization approach as a way of representing competency-related information together with other metadata in ontology in order to enhance machine automation in resources retrieval. The approach represents competency with properties of definition, knowledge reference, evidence of proficiency, and level of proficiency. The effectiveness of resource selection from each of the property is evaluated.

Competencies Management

Competencies in the management literature are analyzed from different perspectives. A converging point of the various approaches is the fact that competencies provide a critical context for a unified treatment of business processes and personal development. In other words the achievement of critical business objectives is directly related to knowledge and learning management. The objective of this chapter is to analyze competencies management from a managerial perspective and to develop a set of requirements for new knowledge and learning management systems aiming to capitalize the application of competencies management in to daily business life. The relevant discussion is initiated with the provision of several real world scenarios that summarize the key business challenges of competencies development, management and reuse, in the Education and Health Domains. The resulting list of requirements is used for a critical overview of limitations of current Technology Enhanced learning approaches especially in the context of real businesses. The concluding section of this chapter discusses the new insights that competencies management through SW and TEL approaches bring to well known business problems and reveals several streams of emerging research on the topic.

Competency Management using the Competence Performance Approach

This chapter introduces a new approach in organizational Competency Management which is based on Korossy’s competence performance approach and which rests on the central idea of connecting competencies to actual job performance. Such an approach has several important benefits when compared to more traditional approaches. First, it brings competency modeling and assessment more closely to the actual work processes and tasks. Secondly, it makes possible validation of the models and the assessment within the modeling and assessment procedure. Finally, it is better able to cope with more dynamic and knowledge based settings. Three case studies in Engineering, Human Resource Management and Research and Development illustrate how the approach is introduced, evaluated and applied. The purpose of the chapter is to inform researchers in eLearning and Knowledge Management of how competencies can be used to support work integrated assessment and learning.

Applying Semantic Web in Competence Management

Efficient competence management is essential in knowledge-based companies. This chapter describes how the Semantic Web technologies can be used in managing employee competencies. Applying the Semantic Web technologies in the competence management enables building systems that support highly dynamic environments, are extensible as well as interoperable between different application domains, and benefit from the use of machine-accessible semantics. Competence management systems should be available not only for managers, but for all the employees of the company. As companies get larger, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage the knowledge and competencies that their employees have. Utilizing the Semantic Web opens many possibilities for building flexible systems for competence management.

An Ontology-Based Competence Management Model to Support Collaborative Working and Organisational Learning

This chapter describes an ontology based competence management model that can be used to support distributed collaborative working and facilitate organisational leaning. The chapter begins by examining the concepts of collaborative working and organisational learning in the context of knowledge management and competence management systems. It describes the different forms of knowledge that can be represented in such systems and uses this to describe an ontology-driven approach to competence management. An outline design for an ontology-driven competence management system and the related content management approach is then outlined using material from earlier work on a group memory system; the competence ontology and expert annotation technique used in group memory system is described in detail. The chapter concludes with some discussion concerning the role of such systems in Knowledge intensive industries and some directions for future research.

Designing and Implementing Views on Competencies

In education as well as in Human Resource Management the concept of competency is becoming more and more important. However competency is a fuzzy concept that lacks coherent terminology and is used in many different meanings. In the first part of this chapter competency is defined as a multi-dimensional construct with five dimensions: specificity, coherency, durability, activity and trainability. Then two approaches are presented to establish the competencies organisations or educational institutes should address :the function-based approach which focuses requirements for good performance in a specific function and the employee based approach which focuses on individual competencies for excellent performers. Finally it is argued that a competency based curriculum should move towards self-directed competency-based learning (SDCBL), using personal learning plans and adopting the flexible learning opportunities of e-learning. However SDCBL can only be successful when learners can be taught to be responsible managers and owners of their own learning process.

Linking E-Government with Organizational Memory through Individual Competencies

Organizational memory or OM, is a concept that has been used to refer to stocks of data, information and knowledge to which every member of the organization has access. In the following chapter we distinguish between what we refer to as ‘Hard-OM’ and ‘Soft-OM’. The term ‘Hard-OM’ is used to refer to a variety of technologies which support the storage of, access to and modification of OM. Soft-OM refers to policies, rules, reporting structures and practices that encourage the active use and updating of OM in addressing current organizational concerns. This chapter considers the role of OM (hard and soft) in relation to the adoption and use of eGovernment systems. We argue that for eGovernment to be successfully adopted by companies, some ‘competences’ to manage and exploit knowledge at the organizational level need to be developed and assessed. In doing so, the research supports the view that the identification of problems, the changing of cognitive patterns and the integration of new measures in the organization, mediate the relationship between the OM and eGovernment.

Ontology-Based Competency Management for Corporate E-Learning

The synergies between ontology management, competency management and e-learning have been explored during the last years both in theoretical and practical level. This chapter describes the architecture, design and deployment of a system which integrates ontologies, with competency management and e-learning, as well as with other human resources functions. Moreover, a detailed description of the supportive methodology and the main lessons learned in technical and organisational areas are presented. This system is being currently deployed for research purposes in a national subsidiary of Microsoft, the IT services multinational firm. The objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with an overview of the key concepts in competency based management, a non-technical methodology for supporting the effective deployment of an ontology-based competency management system and an analysis of the lessons learned during the first deployment phase.

Semantic Web Technologies in the Recruitmant Domain

Due to the large number of job offers published online it is almost impossible for job seekers and job portals to gain an overview of the entire employment market. Since job offers lack semantically meaningful annotations, their location and integration into databases is extremely difficult. In this paper, we demonstrate how the application of Semantic Web technologies, can enable unambiguous identification of concepts and relationships between concepts, to the e-recruitment process provides advantages for all participants in the market. When comparing job and applicant profiles, this abovementioned identification through the use of a dedicated matching function is a key element for increasing the precision of search results provided by search engines. Furthermore, it allows for automating and supporting recruitment processes. In this chapter, we present an application scenario and our prototypical implementation discussing the construction of a human resource ontology for annotating job offers and job applications and our matching function.