People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: TowardsCollaborative Competence Management

People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards

Collaborative Competence Management

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies

Dept. Information Process Engineering

Karlsruhe, GERMANY

{braun|aschmidt}@fzi.de

http://www.fzi.de/ipe

Simone Braun

Andreas Schmidt

2MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks

Agenda

Motivation

• Competency-orientation & competence management

• Current situation & problems


• Ontology Maturing Process for evolving competence catalogs

• Tool support

Conclusions & Outlook

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Competency-Orientation

Competence Management

• aligning human resource development with corporate goals

• identify, secure and make use of employee competencies

• organizational perspective

Competencies as abstractions of work-relevant human

behavior are a promising concept

• for making skills, knowledge, and abilities manageable and

addressable

• for dealing with human potential and performance and their

development

• for enabling holistic approaches

FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe

4

Competency-Orientation

Knowledge management

• Knowledge, skills and abilities are broader than the notion of

„knowledge“

work-relevant competency to act

Training

• Competencies allow for

operationalizing learning goals

and outcomes

Competence Management

• Individual competencies can be aggregated into organizational

competencies


5

Current Situation: Competence Management

Traditionally top-down instruments

Usually based on a somehow hierarchic structured

catalog

• With well-defined semantics competence ontology

• For defining requirement and individual competency profiles

Building of catalog usually one-time activity by a small

group of experts

Outdated catalogs

No continuous improvement

Often used only for a part of the company and for a single

purpose

Separated from individual employee level (competency

profiles)MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks

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Current Situation: Competency Profiles

a) External assessment by superiors or formal

assessment procedures

• expensive & cumbersome

b) Self-assessment by employees describing their

competencies themselves

• often missing motivation, no immediate benefit

• downplaying or exaggeration of competencies

• recent or very specialized topics not contained


7


People Tagging as recent approach

• Transferring the principle of social tagging/bookmarking to

people; e.g. IBM Fringe Contacts

employees describe colleagues by tagging with key words

publicly visible tag cloud characterizes individual employee


8


People Tagging as recent approach

• Transferring the principle of social tagging/bookmarking to

people; e.g. IBM Fringe Contacts

employees describe colleagues by tagging with key words

publicly visible tag cloud characterizes individual employee

However..

• no legitimation and commitment by the organization,

especially wrt. to the vocabulary

• no support to leverage bottom-up topics to organizational

competences vocabulary


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Combine Web 2.0-style bottom-up processes with

organizational top-down processes

• Competence management without an agreed vocabulary (or

ontology) not possible

• Making the process of catalog evolving more collaborative and

embedded in its usage

• Allow every employee to participate and contribute with low

usage barriers; i.e. by tagging colleagues

• Take up and guide these bottom-up developments towards

organizational goals

• Likewise, gaining competency profiles not out of self-

descriptions but collective judgment of others


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Requirements and Key Issues

Bottom-up collection of opinions about individual

competencies

• empower employees to state their opinion on who has which

competency in an easy and task-embedded way

Freedom to evolve competence vocabulary

• enable employees to modify the used vocabulary

allows detecting new trends

Shared vocabulary for comparability

• competencies as integrating factor in the enterprise have to be

shared by the whole organization

Legitimation and commitment by the organization

• organization must decide to which extent it relies on and binds

to collective resultsFZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe

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Ontology Maturing Process for Evolving

Competence Catalogs

Approaching the problem as collaborative ontology

construction problem

Ontology as

• Formal shared conceptualization for a domain of interest

• A “good ontology” balances the aspects:

o Representation of social agreement (“well-defined”, “common

understanding”)

o Formalization for enabling automating processes (“machine-

readable”)

o Appropriateness for domain and purpose (“useful”)


12


Competence Catalogs

Employees annotate each other with any topic tag

new topic ideas emerge


13


Competence Catalogs

A common topic terminology evolves through the

collaborative (re-)usage of the topic tags


14


Competence Catalogs

special community members begin to organize the

topic terminology into competencies by introducing

relations between the topic tagsFZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe

15


Competence Catalogs

Modeling experts add axioms for exploiting

relationships for reasoning; especially precise

composition relationshipsFZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe

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Formality Levels & Use Cases

Coexistence of different formality levels :

Topic tags

• as weak notions

• sufficient for basic search and retrieval functionality

Competency types

• abstract, without differentiation; e.g Java Programming

• well-defined competency notion and taxonomic relationships

o e.g. OO-Programming <broader> Java Programming

• for basic profile matching (different abstraction levels)

• for competency gap analysis (by exact matching)


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Formality Levels & Use Cases

Competencies

• with levels as instance of a competence type

o e.g. Java Programming Beginner/Intermediate/Expert

• for more sophisticated profile matching

o e.g. different degrees of fulfillment

• for basic description of learning opportunities objectives

Competency relationships

• precise generalization, composition relationships for subsumtion

o Java Programming <is-a> OO-Programming

o {Java Pr. Expert, AJAX Beginner} <is-part-of> GWT Pr. Intermediate

• for more sophisticated competency gap analysis

• for competency-based selection of learning opportunities


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Tool Support with SOBOLEO

SOBOLEO is

• a semantic social bookmarking application

• combined with task-embedded competence ontology

development functionality

Course

• Users encounter a colleague’s web page

• Tagging with concepts from the competence ontology or

arbitrary topic tags

• Gathering arbitrary topic tags as “prototypical concepts” for

later consolidation and placement

• Or immediate switch to the ontology editor

o e.g. for adding synonyms or structuring with broader/narrower/

related relations


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SOBOLEO is




Course








related relations


20


SOBOLEO is




Course








related relations


21


SOBOLEO is




Course






• Or immediate switch to the ontology editor for adapting the

ontology, e.g. adding synonym or structuring with

broader/narrower/related relations


http://www.im-wissensnetz.de/Wissensnetz/CMS/Arbeitspakete/AP4/resources/editor.htm

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Conclusions & Outlook

Collaborative competence management provides a

solution to overcome the hitherto strictly top-down

competence management approaches

• covering less formalized topic tags and structures

• guarantee flexibility, usefulness, and timeliness

Current & next activities:

• evaluations how users deal with higher complexity within the

projects Im Wissensnetz and FP7-IP MATURE

• visualization and exploitation of recent/specific topics as

trends from an organizational perspective

• Investigation of environmental constraints (organizational,

cultural, social)


23

Thank you!


Simone Braun

FZI Research Center for Information

Technolgies

[email protected]

http://fzi.de/ipe

FP7 IP MATURE - http://mature-ip.eu

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Different Levels of Formality


Education

People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: TowardsCollaborative Competence Management