Presentation by Simone Braun at the 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems held at Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France, May 20-23, 2008 (COOP 2008)

1. Simone Braun
Andreas Schmidt
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

2. Agenda
 Motivation
• Competency-orientation & competence management
• Current situation & problems
 Collaborative Competence Management
• Ontology Maturing Process for evolving competence catalogs
• Tool support
 Conclusions & Outlook
MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks 2

3. 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 3

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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 4

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 Outdated catalogs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 5

6. 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 6

7. Current Situation: Competency Profiles
 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 7

8. Current Situation: Competency Profiles
 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 8

9. Collaborative Competence Management
 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 9

10. 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 results
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 10

11. 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”)
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 11

12. Ontology Maturing Process for Evolving
Competence Catalogs
 Employees annotate each other with any topic tag
 new topic ideas emerge
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 12

13. Ontology Maturing Process for Evolving
Competence Catalogs
 A common topic terminology evolves through the
collaborative (re-)usage of the topic tags
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 13

14. Ontology Maturing Process for Evolving
Competence Catalogs
 special community members begin to organize the
topic terminology into competencies by introducing
relations between the topic tags
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 14

15. Ontology Maturing Process for Evolving
Competence Catalogs
 Modeling experts add axioms for exploiting
relationships for reasoning; especially precise
composition relationships
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 15

16. 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)
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 16

17. 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 17

18. 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 18

19. 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 19

20. 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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 20

21. 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 for adapting the
ontology, e.g. adding synonym or structuring with
broader/narrower/related relations
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 21

22. 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)
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 22

23. Thank you!
FP7 IP MATURE - http://mature-ip.eu
Simone Braun
FZI Research Center for Information
Technolgies
Simone.Braun@fzi.de
http://fzi.de/ipe
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 23

24. Different Levels of Formality
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe 24