people tagging & ontology maturing: towardscollaborative competence management
DESCRIPTION
Presentation by Simone Braun at the 8th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems held at Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France, May 20-23, 2008 (COOP 2008)TRANSCRIPT
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
Simone Braun
Andreas Schmidt
2MATURE - Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks
Agenda
Motivation
• Competency-orientation & competence management
• Current situation & problems
Collaborative Competence Management
• Ontology Maturing Process for evolving competence catalogs
• Tool support
Conclusions & Outlook
3
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
4
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
5
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Outdated catalogs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
6
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
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
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe
8
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
9
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 self-
descriptions but collective judgment of others
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe
10
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 resultsFZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe
11
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 (“machine-
readable”)
o Appropriateness for domain and purpose (“useful”)
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe
12
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
13
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
14
Ontology Maturing Process for Evolving
Competence Catalogs
special community members begin to organize the
topic terminology into competencies by introducing
relations between the topic tagsFZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe
15
Ontology Maturing Process for Evolving
Competence Catalogs
Modeling experts add axioms for exploiting
relationships for reasoning; especially precise
composition relationshipsFZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe
16
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 <broader> 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
17
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 <is-a> OO-Programming
o {Java Pr. Expert, AJAX Beginner} <is-part-of> 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
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
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
21
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
22
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
23
Thank you!
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe
Simone Braun
FZI Research Center for Information
Technolgies
http://fzi.de/ipe
FP7 IP MATURE - http://mature-ip.eu
24
Different Levels of Formality
FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe, Germany | Information Process Engineering | www.fzi.de/ipe