Integrated Semantic-Based Composition of Skills and Learning Needs in Knowledge-Intensive Organisations

Abstract

Holding and creating competences is one of the most strategic activities in organizations, especially in knowledge intensive ones. An organization dealing with a task to perform will firstly check for the required skills among the available personnel. If such a search process leads to discover lacking competencies, organizations may hire external personnel or encourage internal personnel to learn new competencies on the unavailable skills. The current availability of several, well-organized, e-learning modules, makes such possibility appealing and enonomically advantageous. A skill management system performing both the processes of searching among available skills and facilitating the creation of missing ones can hence be a noteworthy source of competitive advantage for a knowledge-intensive organization. We present here an approach and a system for such purpose, which exploits recent advances in semantic-based inference services and technologies.The proposed approach employs Description Logics formalism and reasoning services and is fully in the Semantic Web initiative mainstream.