An Ontology-centered Approach for Designing an Interactive Competence Management System for IT Companies

The paper presents a generic framework for an intelligent information system of competence management based on ontologies for information technology companies. In a first step it will be applied in an information technology (IT) small enterprise and then its applicability will be verified for other organizations of the same type. The work presented in the paper is performed under the project "CONTO – Ontology-based Competencies Management in Information Technology" funded by the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, involving two universities, a research institute and an IT private company. A competence management system (CMS), in our vision has to achieve three functions: (a) to support the complete and systematic acquisition of knowledge about the competence of the members of an enterprise; (b) to provide the knowledge about competences and their owners; (c) to apply the available knowledge to serve a purpose. The core of the competence management information system is an ontology that plays the role of the declarative knowledge repository containing the basic concepts (such as: company-job, competence, domain, group, person etc.) and their relationships with other concepts, instances and properties. The Protégé environment was used for the development of this ontology. The structure of the ontology is conceived so that description logics can be used to represent the concept definitions of the application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way. Knowledge acquisition is performed in our approach by enriching the ontology, according to the requirements of the IT company. An advantage of using an ontology-based system is the possibility of the identification of new relations among concepts based on inferences starting from the existing knowledge. The user can choose to query instances of one type of concept. The paper also presents some use-cases

A Knowledge-Engine Architecture for a Competence Management Information System

This paper describes the ongoing project to develop a knowledge-engine architecture that is being specified and developed by a Portuguese software development company called Shortcut. The primary goal of this work is create an architecture suitable for use, initially, in a Competence Management System (CMS) but also scalable for later use in more generic forms of Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). In general, Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives promote the management, i.e. the creation, storage and sharing, of knowledge assets within an organization. The practical focus of our work is to support the management of employees’ competencies through using a KM approach to create a web based CMS based on a structured content management infrastructure. The system is designed using an ontology-driven framework that incorporates expert annotations which integrate aspects of less tangible knowledge, such as contextual information with more structured knowledge such as that stored in databases, procedures, manuals, books and reports. The theoretical focus of the work is on the representation of competence-based knowledge resources, such as human capital, skills, heuristics acquired during project development, best practices and lessons-learned. This work should contribute for improving the understanding and analysis of the collective knowledge, skills and competencies that are created through problem solving in day-to-day activities and could act as a meeting point for issues around problem solving in complex organizations and context-based information retrieval

An ontology co-design method for the co-creation of a continuous care ontology

Ontology engineering methodologies tend to emphasize the role of the knowledge engineer or require a very active role of domain experts. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering method is described that holds the middle ground between these two 'extremes'. After thorough ethnographic research, an interdisciplinary group of domain experts closely interacted with ontology engineers and social scientists in a series of workshops. Once a preliminary ontology was developed, a dynamic care request system was built using the ontology. Additional workshops were organized involving a broader group of domain experts to ensure the applicability of the ontology across continuous care settings. The proposed method successfully actively engaged domain experts in constructing the ontology, without overburdening them. Its applicability is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology. The lessons learned during the design and execution of the approach are also presented

An Ontology Approach for Knowledge Acquisition and Development of Health Information System (HIS)

This paper emphasizes various knowledge acquisition approaches in terms of tacit and explicit knowledge management that can be helpful to capture, codify and communicate within medical unit. The semantic-based knowledge management system (SKMS) supports knowledge acquisition and incorporates various approaches to provide systematic practical platform to knowledge practitioners and to identify various roles of healthcare professionals, tasks that can be performed according to personnel’s competencies, and activities that are carried out as a part of tasks to achieve defined goals of clinical process. This research outcome gives new vision to IT practitioners to manage the tacit and implicit knowledge in XML format which can be taken as foundation for the development of information systems (IS) so that domain end-users can receive timely healthcare related services according to their demands and needs

Knowledge representation and evaluation an ontology-based knowledge management approach

Competition between Higher Education Institutions is increasing at an alarming rate, while changes of the surrounding environment and demands of labour market are frequent and substantial. Universities must meet the requirements of both the national and European legislation environment. The Bologna Declaration aims at providing guidelines and solutions for these problems and challenges of European Higher Education. One of its main goals is the introduction of a common framework of transparent and comparable degrees that ensures the recognition of knowledge and qualifications of citizens all across the European Union. This paper will discuss a knowledge management approach that highlights the importance of such knowledge representation tools as ontologies. The discussed ontology-based model supports the creation of transparent curricula content (Educational Ontology) and the promotion of reliable knowledge testing (Adaptive Knowledge Testing System)

Reusing Human Resources Management Standards for Employment Services

Employment Services (ESs) are becoming more and more important for Public Administrations where their social implications on sustainability, workforce mobility and equal opportunities play a fundamental strategic importance for any central or local Government. The EU SEEMP project aims at improving facilitate workers mobility in Europe. Ontologies are used to model descriptions of job offers and curricula; and for facilitating the process of exchanging job offer data and CV data between ES. In this paper we present the methodological approach we followed for reusing existing human resources management standards in the SEEMP project, in order to build a common “language” called Reference Ontology

Semantic reasoning for intelligent emergency response applications

Emergency response applications require the processing of large amounts of data, generated by a diverse set of sensors and devices, in order to provide for an accurate and concise view of the situation at hand. The adoption of semantic technologies allows for the definition of a formal domain model and intelligent data processing and reasoning on this model based on generated device and sensor measurements. This paper presents a novel approach to emergency response applications, such as fire fighting, integrating a formal semantic domain model into an event-based decision support system, which supports reasoning on this model. The developed model consists of several generic ontologies describing concepts and properties which can be applied to diverse context-aware applications. These are extended with emergency response specific ontologies. Additionally, inference on the model performed by a reasoning engine is dynamically synchronized with the rest of the architectural components. This allows to automatically trigger events based on predefined conditions. The proposed ontology and developed reasoning methodology is validated on two scenarios, i.e. (i) the construction of an emergency response incident and corresponding scenario and (ii) monitoring of the state of a fire fighter during an emergency response

Participatory design of a continuous care ontology : towards a user-driven ontology engineering methodology

The patient room of the future would be able to sense the needs and preferences of the patients and nurses and adapt itself accordingly by combining all the heterogeneous data offered by the different technologies. This goal can be achieved by developing a context-aware framework, which exploits and integrates the heterogeneous data by utilizing a continuous care ontology. The existing ontology engineering methodologies are rather extreme in their choices to include domain experts. On the one hand, there are methodologies that only discuss the scope, use and requirements of the ontology with the domain experts. On the other hand, there are approaches in which the ontology is completely constructed by the domain experts by providing them with user-friendly and collaborative tools. In this paper, a participatory ontology engineering methodology is presented that finds a middle ground between these two extremes. The methodology actively involves social scientists, ontology engineers and stakeholders. The stakeholders participate in each step of the ontology life cycle without having to construct the ontology themselves or attribute a large amount of their time. The applicability of the methodology is illustrated by presenting the co-created continuous care ontology

An evaluation of pedagogically informed parameterised questions for self assessment

Self-assessment is a crucial component of learning. Learners can learn by asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them. However, creating effective questions is time-consuming because it may require considerable resources and the skill of critical thinking. Questions need careful construction to accurately represent the intended learning outcome and the subject matter involved. There are very few systems currently available which generate questions automatically, and these are confined to specific domains. This paper presents a system for automatically generating questions from a competency framework, based on a sound pedagogical and technological approach. This makes it possible to guide learners in developing questions for themselves, and to provide authoring templates which speed the creation of new questions for self-assessment. This novel design and implementation involves an ontological database that represents the intended learning outcome to be assessed across a number of dimensions, including level of cognitive ability and subject matter. The system generates a list of all the questions that are possible from a given learning outcome, which may then be used to test for understanding, and so could determine the degree to which learners actually acquire the desired knowledge. The way in which the system has been designed and evaluated is discussed, along with its educational benefits