Enterprise competence organization schema: publishing the published competences

This article was published in the journal Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture [Sage © IMechE]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09544054JEM2097Competence is a standardized way to define the profile of an enterprise. Understanding and auditing competences acquired, required, and desired by a company and further representing them in a structured manner is a beneficial step for enhancing the company's performance. Ontology is emerging as an effective tool to structure competences for comprehensive and transportable machine understanding. In the present paper, ECOS (Enterprise Competence Organization Schema) is presented as a mechanism to capture enterprise competence in a manner understandable by computers. The objective behind this concept is to create a web of machine-readable pages describing basic information and competences of enterprises with sets of interconnected data and semantic models. The ECOS ontology captures enterprise competences using a consistent and comprehensive list of concepts and vocabulary and converts them into a semantic web resource using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The novel concept of an ECOS-card and ECOS-form is proposed and used for developing and publishing enterprise competences. Examples from real-life enterprise applications of ECOS are also shown in the paper