Elsevier

Data & Knowledge Engineering

Volume 107, January 2017, Pages 51-66
Data & Knowledge Engineering

An ontology-based model for competence management

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2016.12.001Get rights and content

Abstract

In the last years, the need for developing strategies, models and tools to manage competences clearly emerges in numerous scenarios. For instance, this emergence especially raises when it is required to realize effective recruiting platforms, decision support systems for human resource management, learning management systems and so on. This work proposes an ontology-based model for the representation of competences able to support a wide range of scenarios where it is fundamental to model, organize and represent professional competences, enable interoperability and co-operation among different and heterogeneous tools and, lastly, execute queries and inference operations over these competences. The proposed model starts from the outcomes of the specialized literature and the related R&D projects and produces a novel integrated model that represents both job offers and demands to support recruiting initiatives and to develop employability strategies aiming at a best matching as well as a careful skill gap analysis.

The model has been evaluated by means of a three-level approach also in the context of the SIRET project whose goal is defining a recruiting and training integrated system able to represent the professional competences of users and to understand the supplies and the demands in order to find optimal agreements in the job market.

Introduction

Nowadays, competences, intended as professional human behaviour abstractions, are going to be fundamental in the management of knowledge and abilities of the workers in many application domains [36]. In the human resource management (HRM), competences may be the criterion to select people for specific tasks. The competence-based selection allows pointing out the person closer to requirements and raising up the performance level inside the enterprise. The competence management may support the definition of learning plans and assessment phases in many contexts by facilitating personalization and adaptation processes, by giving details for competence gap evaluation [43]. Competences may be the means to use in the self-regulation for learning experiences by representing the way to elaborate comparisons among profiles and specific goals. Competences may lead the design of activities and resources in the professional training, fill-in knowledge gap, create learning paths and curricula [25].

Organizational administrative and management structures have overlapping needs to manage features of the human resources in order to improve the information sharing and avoid redundancy in these processes including recruitment, career management, training, payroll etc. Many initiatives and systems raised up their own semantic representations, many others created models too much complex if related to the real and realistic needs an organization and people working there may have.

Other approaches consider the workers’ history of contexts (trail) as in [47], [48] to manage their competences. Some newer work, as [46], proposes a multi-temporal context-aware system for trail management to detect, automatically, the competences of the people.

Thus, as stated in [15] and [29], the competence modelling is taking on these new challenges: “A unified framework for competence representation; Semantic coherence in competence management for all HRM systems; Trade-Off in the competence modelling between accuracy and realistic needs”.

An attempt in this should be the work leaded by the Taskforce on Competency Modelling of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). They collected the best practice for competence modelling [7] by involving people from Microsoft Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Boeing Company, Aon Consulting and Purdue University. Their model is the KSAO, Knowledge, Skill, Ability and Other characteristic. However the main areas this model approaches are: i) Identifying competencies, ii) Organizing and presenting competency information, iii) Using competency information.

Competence modelling is useful to recruit people, to create training programmes, to evaluate performances, to collect information on learning and working experiences, to plan and manage structural changes inside the enterprises [42].

The proposed model is a novel approach that represents both job offers and demands to support recruiting initiatives and to improve employability strategies aiming at a best matching as well as a careful skill gap analysis. It starts from the outcomes of the specialized literature and the related R&D projects by focusing and trying to solve the main issues left open by the existing works.

In this paper, we describe the background of the competence modelling in terms of main concepts, literature review, related research projects and the project we are involved in. Then, we present the methodology adopted to define our competence model by underlining how we applied it, the model in details and its static and dynamic components. After that, we discuss the results of an evaluation from three different point of view: a technical analysis, a small scale experiment and a comparison with the requirements coming from the Italian laws. Then, we moved the described approach in the domain of Linked Open Data. At the conclusion of the paper, there is a section with final remarks.

Section snippets

The concept of Competence

In the scientific literature, there is not an agreed definition of competence, but different and subjective interpretations triggering, often, debates and confusion as well. For instance, often, the concepts of competence and competency are synonyms in literature. We would refer, as in [12], to the following notions:

  • Competence: it is the ability of an actor to do actions for a situation in an effective and efficient way; it cannot be directly measurable, but estimated from the performance.

Ontology engineering methodology

The ontology engineering discipline studies principles, methods and tools for the design, the development and the maintaining of the ontology structures [20], [31]. In particular, the ontology engineering methodology treats processes and methodological aspects of the ontology engineering by giving guidelines to follow in the ontology modelling. As stated in [3] and [38], there are many ontology engineering methodologies and each of them may lack something in management, maintenance, etc. Newer

Evaluation and discussion

The evaluation of the defined model has been organized from three different viewpoints. The first one is the technical validation of syntactic and semantic features. By using a reasoner, we verified the formal structure of the model. The second one is the pertinence of this competence model to the recruiting actions. We defined some possible real situations and verified the completeness of the model with respect to the requirements raised up by these scenarios. The last one is the validation

The competence model in the linked open data

The proposed competence model has been designed for the SIRET project and it is applied to represent both job offers and demands in order to support recruiting initiatives. In fact, the SIRET platform is able to acquire job offers and job demands. Inside the system, they are represented by instantiating the same model so they are competence ontologies. When we should support any recruiting actions, we may lead back the problem to the ontology matching and approach it by means of some ontology

Final remarks

The paper proposes an ontology-based model able to represent professional competences. We started from the study and analysis of the state of the art in this domain where we found a lot of interesting research projects and initiatives. IEEE RCD, ARISTOTELE, PROLIX, PLOC have been considered and explicitly integrated in our model. All the aspects together with the goal to face all the issues raised by the Italian n.92/2012 law on the theme of employability, learning, etc.

The competence is an

Acknowledgments

Partially supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the project SIRET, Recruiting and Training Integrated System (PON 01_03024 approved by D.D. 721/Ric 2011, October 14 and started in 2011, November 1). Special thanks to the other partners involved in these research activities: Gepin PA S.p.A., Rome, Italy, CRMPA, Centro di Ricerca in Matematica Pura e Applicata, Fisciano (SA), Italy and MOMA S.p.A., Baronissi (SA), Italy, DADAT, University of Naples Federico II, Italy.

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