Business semantics management: A case study for competency-centric HRM

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.