Ontology-Based Competency Management: Infrastructures for the Knowledge Intensive Learning Organization

Abstract

Learning activities can be considered the final outcome of a complex process inside knowledge intensive organizations. This complex process encompasses a dynamic cycle, a loop in which business or organizational needs trigger the necessity of acquiring or enhancing human resource competencies that are essential to the fulfillment of the organizational objectives. This continuous evolution of organizational knowledge requires the management of records of available and required competencies, and the automation of such competency handling thus becomes a key issue for the effective functioning of knowledge management activities. This chapter describes the use of ontologies as the enabling semantic infrastructure of competency management, describing the main aspects and scenarios of the knowledge creation cycle from the perspective of its connection with competency definitions.