Competence management approaches appear as promising instruments for more effective resource allocation, knowledge management, learning support, and human resource development particularly in larger companies. They aim at making transparent individual competencies and their relationship to organizational goals. 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applications like expert finder or expert locator systems have often failed in the long run because of incomplete and outdated data, apart from social and organizational barriers. This affects both competency profiles of the individual employee and non-adequate and often also outdated competency catalogs used as a vocabulary for the profiles.

The key idea of the approach 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.

This collaborative approach to competence management is an example of the strand of ontology maturing within MATURE in which we deal with knowledge how to name, describe, and relate things. The study shows how tagging behavior (as a way of capturing early maturity stages of semantic knowledge) can be used to feed organizational models in a bottom-up way.

In this study, we aim at exploring

• the motivational, and social aspects that could hinder the success of people tagging with the help of two experiments
• the support of people tagging with the semantic social bookmarking paradigm based on the SOBOLEO too

More information

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