Ontology-based Competency Management: the Case Study of the Mihajlo Pupin Institute

Semantic-based technologies have been steadily increasing their relevance in recent years in both the research world and business world. Considering this, the present article discusses the process of design and implementation of a competency management system in information and communication technologies domain utilizing the latest Semantic Web tools and technologies including D2RQ server, TopBraid Composer, OWL 2, SPARQL, SPARQL Rules and common human resources related public vocabularies. In particular, the paper discusses the process of building individual and enterprise competence models in a form of ontology database, as well as different ways of meaningful search and retrieval of expertise data on the Semantic Web. The ontological knowledge base aims at storing the extracted and integrated competences from structured, as well as unstructured sources. By using the illustrative case study of deployment of such a system in the Human Resources sector at the Mihajlo Pupin Institute, this paper shows an example of new approaches to data integration and information management. The proposed approach extends the functionalities of existing enterprise information systems and offers possibilities for development of future Internet services. This allows organizations to express their core competences and talents in a standardized, machine processable and understandable format, and hence, facilitates their integration in the European Research Area and beyond.