Business semantics management: A case study for competency-centric HRM
Introduction
When the Bologna process was initiated [13], education within the European Community has been retargeted to fulfil employment market needs. To this end, competency-centric human resource management (HRM) is being installed as a standard practice. In HRM, the essential concept is a (human) competency. Competencies describe the skills and knowledge individuals should have in order to be fit for particular jobs.
Competency modelling received considerable contemplation both from government, educational and business organisations, and human capital management software vendors. As HRM applications are becoming increasingly “driven” by competencies, a European standard will be a cornerstone for an integrated European vocational policy.2
Fig. 1 illustrates the pivotal role of competency models as a lever for semantic interoperability between a wide range of HRM applications. Semantic interoperability is the ability of two or more information systems (or their computerised components) to communicate data and to interpret the information in the data that has been communicated both in a meaningful manner, i.e. by means of an ontology [14] that is shared by the involved information systems [3].
Particularly for vocational education (VE), having a centrally shared and commonly used Vocational Competency Ontology is crucial to exchange competency-related information among industry, schools, and public employment agencies. None of these organisations however, have successfully implemented an enterprise-wide “competency initiative”, let alone a strategy for inter-organisational exchange of competency-related information.
Section snippets
Mind the gap
The European employment market is characterised by a contradictory situation. On the one hand, there is a very large number of candidates who fail to find a job. On the other hand, many employers are unsuccessful in locating appropriate candidates for their vocations. Gap analysis between candidate profiles and employers’ needs is crippled by the lack of explicit semantics in both candidate and market profiles, defined in terms of competencies, enterprises expected skills, training
Business semantics management
Business semantics management (BSM) is the act of bringing a community of stakeholders together to realise the reconciliation of their heterogeneous metadata, and consequently the application of the derived business semantics patterns in partial fulfilment of well-established semantic interoperability requirements. We identify seven principles of business semantic management [3]:
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ICT democracy An ontology should be defined by its owning community, and not by a single developer.
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Emergence Semantic
Implementation
In this case, we ran two business semantics management iterations resulting in a VCO 2.0 release and two VCO perspectives, taken by the Dutch bakery educational institutes and automotive industry respectively.7
Discussion
The Semantic Pattern Base resulting from two business semantics management iterations contains 450 concept types, 10 domain semantic patterns, and 50 stakeholder perspectives. Next, we elaborate further on some observations and discuss key lessons we drew from this case study.
Seven principles of business semantics management have been implemented in this case study an turned out to be valid propositions.
Methodology The problem is not in what ontologies are, but how they become shared formal
Conclusion and future work
In this article we introduced a novel approach and tool for community-grounded fact-oriented business semantics management that is inspired by agile design methods. We demonstrated and validated it in a realistic case study within the European Codrive project. Key challenges were the uniform publication of unambiguous competency information and “time-to-competency” agility. To this end, we used business semantics management to develop a conceptual, shared and formal knowledge representation of
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Codrive consortium, and particularly Christophe Debruyne, Aldo de Moor, and Davor Meersman for their contributions. The research was partially sponsored by the EU FP6 IST PROLIX (FP6-IST-027905) and FP7 TAS3 project, and the Brussels-Capital Region (IWOIB PRB 2006).
Dr. Pieter De Leenheer is an assistant professor in Information and Service Sciences at VU University Amsterdam, where he gives courses on Online Information Systems, E-business Planning and Innovation, and Business Semantics. He is also co-founder and research director of Collibra nv/sa, a Brussels-based semantic software company that spun off from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). From 2002-2009, Pieter was a senior scientist at VUB STARLab, and lecturer at the same university. Pieter
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Dr. Pieter De Leenheer is an assistant professor in Information and Service Sciences at VU University Amsterdam, where he gives courses on Online Information Systems, E-business Planning and Innovation, and Business Semantics. He is also co-founder and research director of Collibra nv/sa, a Brussels-based semantic software company that spun off from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). From 2002-2009, Pieter was a senior scientist at VUB STARLab, and lecturer at the same university. Pieter holds a PhD, BSc and MSc in principle computer science, all three from VUB.
Pieter is the key co-designer of the principles and methods of Business Semantics Management that are underpinning Collibra's software products, which are deployed in various public administrations and companies.
Pieter authored more than 40 publications in various books, international journals and conferences, among which he co-edited the Springer book “Ontology Management for the Semantic Web”.
Stijn Christiaens is co-founder and COO of Collibra. He has been an R&D engineer in the supply-chain and warehouse management industry and a researcher at the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Stijn holds an MSc in Industrial Engineering (in IT) from the Katholieke Hogeschool Gent (KiHo), an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, a degree in Project Management (PMI) from the European University College and a Postgraduate in Industrial Corporate Governance at the European University College.
Prof. Dr. Robert Meersman is a full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. Earlier positions include the University of Antwerp (UIA, 1975–1978), Control Data Corp. (Data Management Research Lab, Brussels, Belgium, 1978–1983). Worked there on the definition of the NIAM (now ORM) method as well as on its query and constraint languages (RIDL) and on the first tools for this methodology. Founded the first InfoLab at University of Hasselt (Belgium, 1983–1986) and the second at University of Tilburg (The Netherlands, 1986–1995). Founded the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) at VUB in 1995. Director of STARLab since. Current scientific interests include ontologies, database semantics, domain and database modelling, interoperability and meaningful use of databases in applications such as enterprise knowledge management, the Semantic Web, and community-driven computing in general.
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At the time the research was conducted, Pieter worked for the Semantics Technology & Applications Laboratory, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.