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

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

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

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

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 Building of catalog usually one-time activity by a small group of experts  Outdated catalogs  No continuous improvement  Often used only for a part of the company and for a single purpose  Separated from individual employee level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

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

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

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

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 selfdescriptions but collective judgment of others

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

9

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

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 (“machinereadable”) o Appropriateness for domain and purpose (“useful”)

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

11

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

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

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

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

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 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

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 OO-Programming o {Java Pr. Expert, AJAX Beginner} 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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you!

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

Simone Braun FZI Research Center for Information Technolgies [email protected] http://fzi.de/ipe FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe

23

Different Levels of Formality

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

24