Integrated semantic-based composition of skills and learning needs in knowledge-intensive organizations

Holding and creating competencies is one of the most strategic activities in organizations, especially in knowledge intensive ones. An organization dealing with a task to perform will first check for the required skills among the available personnel. If such a search process leads to discovering 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 a possibility appealing and economically 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. © 2007, Idea Group Inc.