We introduce a Semantic Web-based competence manager system called Competence Manager, which allows managing employee competencies and other relevant resources about a set of topics. The Competence Manager provides exible operations for both querying the knowledge base, and managing the ontologies. The usage scenarios of the Competence Manager range from intra-organization use to interoperability between multiple organizations.
For companies with intellectual property it is crucial to have an environment, where the knowledge can be shared e ciently within the company. In this paper we describe an ontology-based tool called Competence Manager, with which the members of an organization (e.g., a company) are able to manage, publish, disseminate, and search for competencies and other relevant resources, such as documents, projects and customers.
Our system allows supporting multiple ontologies for di erent domains, which can be imported and switched at runtime. In addition to maintaining multiple simultaneous domain ontologies, the interoperability|for instance from one organization to another|does not require changes to the implementation.
The di erence between the Competence Manager and other typical competence management tools is that in the case where the best candidates (i.e., persons having competence directly on the searched topic) are not available, the candidates having competence on semantically nearby topic(s) can be found. This means that we can look up persons that are the best possible candidates for the searched competence area. In addition, we can search for the best candidate(s) from several domains with di erent emphasizes (e.g., candidates that have excellent competence on ontologies and can speak Finnish, but the language criterion with lower priority).
The bene ts of the Competence Manager are clear for companies with
intellectual properties. In addition, because of formally de ned semantics of the
domain ontologies, the system is useful when disseminating competencies
between organizations. In doing so, the Competence Manager can be used as tool
for nding organizations based on their real competencies.
In this section we shortly outline the intra-organizational usage of the
Competence Manager. The details are described in [
Competence Manager employs OWL for the ontologies, which are divided into general and domain-speci c parts, see Figures 2 and 3, respectively. The general ontology de nes the mandatory classes and properties for the competence topic hierarchy. The domain ontologies de ne the domain-speci c resources, and must conform to the general ontology. This asserts that the query engine works correctly with the domain ontologies.
The topic hierarchy in the domain-speci c ontology is realized as instances of the Topic class, and parent-child relations are de ned using the hasParentTopic property. The instances of the Relevance class specify the relevance level of some resource (e.g., a person's competence) to a certain topic.
The domain ontology de nes the classes and their instances that have competencies or are related to the topics. The resources can be freely de ned as domain-speci c classes, as long as they are subclasses of the Resource class. Furthermore, the relationships (properties) between the domain-speci c resources can be freely de ned, but the properties must be de ned as a subproperty of the hasResource property.
In a case where direct matches are not found, the people with competence on semantically nearby topic(s) can be searched for. This is crucial today, when for instance new products hit the markets rapidly. Let us consider the following example. At a software company Cs a person has competence on a mobile phone model , which is manufactured by phone vendor Cv Then, Cv releases a new mobile phone , which is based on the model , but on which nobody at Cs has yet competence. However, at some point when competencies for the new mobile phone are needed at Cs, in our approach the persons having competence on the phone model are found. Although this is not an exact match, it is a very close one, because usually the given phones are similar in functionality. Therefore, adding or changing the competence area structure does not necessarily require corresponding updates to the competencies of the persons.
The distance calculation between competence topics is based on formally
de ned semantics and an algorithm called Object Match [
Within a single organization, the Competence Manager is used for managing and disseminating employee competencies. Firstly, competent persons can be searched for within the organization. Secondly, the Competence Manager can be used as a tool during performance appraisal between superiors and their employees. Thirdly, the Competence Manager can serve as a tool in strategic coordination activities. The overall competence levels on various areas can be analyzed, and in de ning company's strategic goal, the areas needing more or less competence can be identi ed. As a result, the aggreated competencies of the organization can be de ned, and made available for other organizations. In doing so, the Competence Manager can be used as tool for nding organizations based on their real competencies.
Usually when companies are formed, they have to be registered to some national authority using for instance an industrial classi cation schemas. However, especially for small companies, it may be hard to nd a suitable classi cation for the company. Furthermore, if the company refocuses itself at some point later, changing the classi cation is cumbersome. This may lead to a situation, where the company has competencies that are not directly related to their registered core business. The Competence Manager can be used to overcome this problem by letting the companies publish (and update) their competencies at any time. Therefore, the Competence Manager acts as a directory service{Competence Directory, from which companies can search for instance possible partners based on their competencies, see Figure 4.
Because companies may use their own domain ontologies, they cannot be
uploaded as such to the Competence Directory. Instead, the companies publish
their domain ontology (topics hierarchy) and other resources|competencies,
documents, projects|using FOAF [
Trust plays an essential role in systems like Competence Directory, where companies may state their own compentencies. The essential challenge is to assure that the information published is accurate. We believe that in this kind of collaborative systems, the abusers will eventually be exposed. Reputation among other companies is very important, and it would be unwise to ruin it by publishing false competencies. Further, the foaf:knows property can be used to de ne one-way links between companies. For instance, a company Cs is searching for a partner, and the search results multiple companies, Cr1, Cr2, and Cr3. The Cs may have an existing and succesfull partnership with a company Cp, that is, Cs foaf:knows Cp. Now, if Cp has an existing partnership with some of the companies in the search result, they are certainly preferred over the ones that the Cs knows nothing about.