Exploiting semantic and social technologies for competency management

In an enterprise context, competencies are often dispersed across different teams. A specific need within the enterprise could not be satisfied only because of a lack of awareness about real competencies owned by employees. The aforementioned problem involves two main critical aspects: the difficulty to manage employees' competencies in order to constantly keep them up-to-date and the ability to agilely share employees' profiles across the organization in order to support competency finding. This work proposes an approach to relax the above critical points by integrating a semantic web-based educational system within a social network system applied to the enterprise context. The integration glue is provided by using and harmonizing several existing upper ontologies also furthering semantic interoperability. © 2010 IEEE.