In this article we introduce a novel approach and tool for fact-oriented business semantics management that is inspired by agile design methods. We demonstrate and validate it in a realistic case study that was carried out within the European Codrive project. Codrive’s vision was to contribute to more meaningful competency-centric human resource management. Key challenges are the uniform publication of unambiguous competency information and “time-to-competency” agility. To this end, we developed a shared and formal knowledge representation of competency domains. Stakeholders include educational institutes, public employment organisations, and industry partners from different European countries. The resulting Vocational Competency Ontology wanted to provide a candidate best practice for engineering a community-shared and reusable semantic pattern base that can be applied by all stakeholders to semantically reconcile their contextualised competency models.
De Leenheer, P., Christiaens, S., and Meersman, R. (2009) Business Semantics Management: a Case Study for Competency-centric HRM. In Journal of Computers in Industry: Special Issue about Semantic Web Computing in Industry. Elsevier, forthcoming
Tags: ontology evolution, HRM, dogma-mess, semantic interoperability, business semantics, methodology, semantic pattern, tool
