People Strand: Maturing of Competency Descriptions
Related publications
2012
Simone Braun
Community-driven & Work-integrated Creation, Use and Evolution of Ontological Knowledge Structures
Abstract The thesis aims to support the collaborative development of ontological knowledge structures by communities of knowledge workers in order to facilitate the organization and sharing of information within their domain. One big challenge for today’s organizations and knowledge workers is the focused discovery of new information that is likely to be interesting and useful in order to generate new knowledge. But it is also the organization thus information that had once be found and identified as such can be rediscovered and shared. This is not only about the information itself but also about the people behind who hold the knowledge and e. g., may quickly provide assistance if there are questions. Knowledge about competencies and capabilities of its employees also is an essential need for an organization and its development. This encompasses activities like team staffing or identifying training needs. Research on ontology-based semantic (web) applications has shown that ontologies are well-suited for organizing and retrieving relevant resources being it people or documents because they connect information resources with machine processable background knowledge. However in practice, ontology-based applications still haven’t made their breakthrough. This might be traced back to the high effort and complexity of ontology development. On the other hand, folksonomy-based systems recently have proven to be agile and user-driven approaches for the same application area. They enable their users to collect, manage and share information resources in an easy and lightweight way. However, their lack of semantics also causes a number of problems plaguing tagging and hampering tag-based retrieval. To that end, this thesis explores how we can combine folksonomy- and ontology-based approaches so that we keep their particular advantages and avoid their disadvantages thus supporting communities of knowledge workers in organizing and maintaining a shared information repository. This is investigated in the application of Social Semantic Bookmarking and Semantic People Tagging. We present Ontology Maturing as a new perspective and conceptual model for the collaborative development of ontological knowledge structures. It supports (1) the development of a shared understanding, (2) the translation of Web 2.0 approaches to ontology engineering for more active participation, (3) the incremental formalization, (4) application-orientation & work-integration and (5) usable evolving models. To that end, we analyze the advantages and challenges of ontologies and ontology-based knowledge organization systems and make a comparison and consolidation of ontology spectra in literature as well as of ontology development methodologies and tools. A conceptual design framework complements the ontology maturing model. It supports software developers in deriving and realizing socio-technical systems that scaffold and guide ontology maturing in the application of Social Semantic Tagging for a given organizational setting. It considers technical as well as non-technical aspects. It organizes and provides methods and tools with that end users without modeling expertise can collaboratively organize their information with ontologies and develop the latter one in a work-integrated way. To that end, we analyze the advantages and challenges of folksonomies and folksonomy-based systems and classify tagging motivations and categories in literature. On this basis, we develop a general definition and model of social semantic tagging and its specializations of social semantic bookmarking and semantic people tagging. The SOBOLEO framework presents a flexible culture-system-fit framework and reference implementation of the conceptual model and conceptual design framework. It provides a configurable and extensible architecture as well as reusable reference data models for social semantic bookmarking and semantic people tagging and competence ontology maturing. The review of related work shows that SOBOLEO is a pioneer for SKOS editors and the first implementation for semantic people tagging ever. Following the methodology of design-based research, the model, conceptual design framework and technical framework have been validated and iteratively improved in nine case studies with more than 250 participants involved.
Simone Braun, Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt
People Tagging and Ontology Maturing: An Enterprise Social Media Approach to Competence Management
International Journal for Knowledge and Learning, 2012
Abstract Semantic People Tagging is an Enterprise 2.0-style approach to making expertise and individual capabilities transparent. By combining it with a collaborative ontology editor and thus the possibility to construct a shared vocabulary and understanding, it can be a supplement for cumbersome competence management, or expert nder solutions, which lack acceptance among employees, and suer from outdated data. It gives human resources a timely overview of available and required competencies based on peer reviews and actual usage. However, it also needs to be tailored to the cultural characteristics of a speci c company. Therefore, we have developed a design framework for semantic people tagging. We want to present the general approach based on the ontology maturing concept of gradual formalization and its implementation based on a social semantic bookmarking system. Focus group interviews with HR experts have further yielded insights into the wider context and validated the concept. The system has been introduced and evaluated at a company for career advising.
2010
Simone Braun, Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt
People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management
In: Randall, David and Salembier, Pascal (eds.): From CSCW to Web2.0: European Developments in Collaborative Design Selected Papers from COOP08, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Springer, 2010
Abstract Competence Management approaches suggest promising instruments for more effective resource allocation, knowledge management, learning support, and human resource development in general. However, especially on the level of individual employees, such approaches have so far not been able to show sustain-able success on a larger scale. Piloting applications like expert finders have often failed in the long run because of incomplete and outdated data, apart from social and organizational barriers. To overcome these problems, we propose a collabora-tive competence management approach. In this approach, we combine Web 2.0-style bottom-up processes with organizational top-down processes. We addressed this problem as a collaborative ontology construction problem of which the con-ceptual foundation is the Ontology Maturing Process Model. In order to realize the Ontology Maturing Process Model for competence management, we have built the AJAX-based semantic social bookmarking application SOBOLEO that offers task-embedded competence ontology development and an easy-to-use interface. Following evolutionary prototyping within the design-based research methodology we conducted two field experiments in parallel with the system development in order to test the approach of people tagging in general and to explore motivational and social aspects in particular.
2008
Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt
People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management
In: 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP '08), Carry-le-Rouet, France, May 20-23, 2008, 2008
Abstract Competence Management approaches, aiming at making transparent individual competencies and their relationship to organizational goals, suggest promising instruments for more effective resource allocation, knowledge management, learning support, and human resource development in general. However, especially on the level of individual employees, such approaches have so far not been able to show sustainable success on a larger scale. Piloting applications like expert finders have often failed in the long run because of incomplete and outdated data, apart from social and organizational barriers. This affects both competency profiles of the individual employee and non-adequate and often also outdated competency catalogs used as a vocabulary for the profiles. To overcome these problems, we propose a collaborative competence management approach. In this approach, we combine Web 2.0-style bottom-up processes with organizational top-down processes: Web 2.0 oriented bottom-up processes allow every employee to participate and contribute with low usage barriers; i.e. by tagging colleagues; the organizational processes take up and guide these bottom-up developments towards organizational goals. Key idea is that we cannot do competence management completely without an agreed vocabulary (or ontology), i.e. the competency catalog, but we have to make the process of evolving this catalog more collaborative and embedded into its actual usage (e.g., while tagging other employees). Likewise, we do not conceive competency profiles as self-descriptions, but rather as results of collective judgments of others. We approached this problem as a collaborative ontology construction problem of which the conceptual foundation is the Ontology Maturing Process Model. In order to realize the Ontology Maturing Process Model for competence management, we have built the AJAX-based semantic social bookmarking application SOBOLEO that offers task-embedded competence ontology development and an easy-to-use interface.