Today I was invited to a meeting of the IEEE LTSC WG20 for starting a liaison activity between the various stakeholders in competency-based data management. Its goal was to form a group for developing a shared conceptual model. I have presented a very brief summary of our work in that area:

Here is also the position paper.

One of my main points was that we need to look at the use cases and their specific requirements as many of the misunderstandings come from the implicit assumption of a certain use case. Our initial analysis of use cases is reported here:

Simone Braun, Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt
People Tagging & Ontology Maturing: Towards Collaborative Competence Management
In: David Randall and Pascal Salembier (eds.): From CSCW to Web2.0: European Developments in Collaborative Design Selected Papers from COOP08, Computer Supported Cooperative Work vol. , Springer, 2010

Some use cases, like people finding, only rely on very weak notions of interests, while others – like career planning and rewarding schemes – rely on sound competency definitions. This is very important to understand – because all of them tend to speak of competencies. This also helps to understand why in some cases >700 competencies are appropriate, and in others 20 might be sufficient.

For a general conceptual model, I have pointed out the following challenges:

• Competencies are cultural abstractions
• Competency definitions are implicitly contextualized and a certain degree of ambiguity will always remain.
• Competency definitions are purpose-driven conceptualizations
• Competencies are time-dependent conceptualizations

Following the discussion at the ICOPER symposium, I have tried to bring the different terms into a logical order with particular focus on the relationships between the term – not so much on defining precisely the meaning.

Here is an intermediate result:

On Thursday and Friday I had the opportunity to go to the OnlineEduca Berlin. It is a huge combined congress and fair with over 2.000 participants from more than 90 countries. For my taste, this is way too big – it creates an atmosphere of restlessness and anonymity where meeting people is possible, but you do not really feel like spending enough time on really exchanging ideas. Breaks are too short, sessions too many. But it appears that others do not share this opinion – otherwise they would not come to the event repeatedly.

Well, apart from that, there were interesting keynotes on the first day: Michael Wesch, a anthropologist from Kansas presentedwho managed that his home-made YouTube video became an incredible success (and he has since then produced several interesting ones! – my colleague Valentin already recommended one of them in his recent blog entries), but also Norbert Bolz (who was less entertaining, but also had interesting ideas) like the importance of self-branding.

While there was no single big conference theme, I gained the impression that the two big topics were serious games and (with some distance) mobile learning. There was some reference to personal learning environments (e.g., by Fronter) and the obligatory reference to Web 2.0,  but few consequences could be seen.

I myself presented MATURE from an (almost) non-technical perspective, highlighting new approaches to guidance via the gardening metaphor and the necessity of a participatory culture:

Additionally, Gilbert Peffer from CIMNE organized a session on serious games for the financial domain (both for private financial decisions and for professional trader training), and provided a possibility to look into the upcoming xDELIA project (where FZI a is also involved both from the sensor side and from the perspective of experimental economics).

On the day before OnlineEduca, I participated in the ICOPER event on Competencies as the Currency for Learning, which aims at bootstrapping a standardization effort on competencies. More about that in the blog entry on the MATURE blog.

Rethinking learning in enterprises in response to bottom-up participatory approaches is one of the main themes of the MATURE IP. So together with my colleague Simone Braun (FZI), Graham Attwell (Pontydysgu), Eric Ras (Fraunhofer IESE), Stefanie Lindstaedt (Know-Center), and Ronald Maier (University of Innsbruck) we are organizing a workshop at this year’s ECTEL conference in Maastricht on that subject: Learning in Enterprise 2.0 and Beyond.

Recently, we have seen a paradigm shift in technology support for learning towards more participatory approaches in which learners are seen as active contributors. Within enterprises, this new perspective brings together traditionally separated disciplines like e-learning, knowledge management, and human resources development, but also requires a fundamental change of the culture of the respective enterprise towards an enterprise 2.0, which is characterized by enhanced collaboration and a cultural of employee participation. The enterprise 2.0 needs to understand itself as a learning organization, needs to leverage bottom-up processes (from the employee towards the organization) and aim at closed-loop approaches where feedback, continuous improvement, and encouraging small and large-scale innovations at all levels is key.

In this workshop, we aim at exploring new ways of technology-enhanced learning within an enterprise on the way to enterprise 2.0, and the role of learning technology in the transformation process. This includes the exploration of individual perspectives in the form of personal learning environments (in contrast to traditional LMS or VLE), the community perspective, and the organizational perspective (new forms of guidance, e.g., as part of competence management strategies). There is a tension between these different perspectives, which has a huge impact on the success of learning technologies in the enterprise. Therefore, we are also looking for conceptual approaches addressing these issues.

One important aspect in this respect is the consideration of motivational factors affecting the engagement in learning activities and the contribution towards organizational goals: how can we leverage the intrinsic motivation of employees and create learning contexts that keep this motivation alive? What is the effect of social relationships?

An essential part of the workshop will be the interaction of the participants, aiming at a better definition/characterization of enterprise 2.0 and the implications for future research approaches. This will be facilitated by a larger discussion slot which will be moderated and guided by lead questions.

Topics

Topics include empirical, conceptual, and technical approaches in the following areas:

• Designing personal learning environments
  • Learner as consumer and producer and learner empowerment
  • Relevant tools, services, and architectures
  • Bottom-up approaches for work-integrated learning
  • Connecting knowledge assets, e.g. with mashups, semantic structures
• Exploring the tension between individual and organizational perspectives on learning
  • Scaffolding and guidance of individual learning processes towards organizational goals (business or competence development goals)
  • Exploring the transitions between individual, community, and organizational learning
  • Learning in distributed communities of practice and collaboration between different enterprises
  • Approaches bridging knowledge management, e-learning, and human resources perspectives
  • Employability, role of different types of e-portfolios
  • Collaborative and participatory competence management
  • Novel educational approaches and learning theories on technology-enhanced individual and organizational learning
• Motivational and social aspects
  • Motivational and social barriers to informal learning
  • Designing learning environments to leverage intrinsic motivation
  • Awareness of social relationships

Target Group

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners concerned with learning in enterprises including includes researchers from different backgrounds like information technology, (vocational) pedagogy, psychology, and multiple fields of expertise like e-learning, knowledge management, human resources, among others.

Submission Types

• Research papers (up to 10 pages)
• Position papers (up to 5 pages)
• Experience reports (short up to 5 pages, long up to 10 pages)

Organization Commitee

Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany  [main contact, email: aschmidt@fzi.de]
Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, UK
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Ronald Maier, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Eric Ras, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany

Programme Commitee

Alan Brown, University of Warwick, UK
John Cook, London Metropolitan University, UK
Knut Hinkelmann, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland
Helen Keegan, University of Salford, UK
Barbara Kieslinger, ZSI, Austria (TBC)
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Johannes Magenheim, University of Paderborn, Germany
Torsten Leidig, SAP, Germany (TBC)
Jeanne Mengis, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Andrew Ravenscroft, London Metropolitan University, UK
Uwe Riss, SAP, Germany (TBC)
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium
Amir Winer, Center for Futurism in Education, Ben-Gurion-University of the Negev, Israel
Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
Volker Zimmermann, IMC, Germany

After a successful OntoContent 2007 workshop, we are now preparing a next instance of the OntoContent workshop series. This year will will concentrate on user-centered semantics (under the theme of Web 3.0) and on collecting experiences on ontology engineering and maintenance from the fields of Human Resources, and e-health/life sciences/ambient assisted living.

Ontology Content and Evaluation in Enterprise
with two Special Tracks on Human Resources and E-Health/AAL

in conjunction with OnTheMove Federated Conferences 2008, Monterrey, Mexico

http://ontocontent2008.mature-ip.eu

Under the buzz word Semantic Web a lot of research has been going on in recent years, exploring formalisms for expressing ontologies, reasoning algorithms for inferencing hidden knowledge in an open world, but also on “semantifying” different types of problems. But outside the Semantic Web research community, there has been little uptake so far. This is also due to the fact that the concept of ontology is more about content than formalism, and we are in dire need for content-related research and experiences. As Braun et al. 2007 stated, a “good” ontology is a balance of the degree of social agreement, the level of formality, and the appropriateness for the problem at hand that is supposed to be solved with ontologies. In line with this view, the workshop is looking for experiences and empirical results on which formalism is better suited, how to achieve or measure social agreement, and how to judge whether an ontology is appropriate. It is the mission of this workshop to report on these experiences and to reflect them back to the Semantic Web community.

In the area of system design, there is currently a major shift taking place towards user-centered design, and the workshop aims to foster use-centered ontology-based system design. Therefore, we also welcome research and experiences on participatory and evolutionary approaches (i.e., with a continuously high degree of involvement of the actual users) to building and maintaining ontologies that pave the way towards a Web 3.0, bringing together users and semantics.

We also strongly encourage to submit critical papers deriving lessons from failures with “ontologies in the wild”, not only stereotypical success reports!

Workshop Structure and Topics

The workshop will consists of three main parts: a general part on experiences with real-world ontology engineering and approaches to assessment of ontologies, a special track on ontologies in Human Resources and a special track on ontologies in e-health and ambient-assisted living.

• Towards Web 3.0: a user-centered semantic web
  • lessons from Web 2.0 for ontology engineering
  • experiences with participatory and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (e.g., based on social software)
  • lightweight ontology formalisms (e.g., SKOS) and microformats
  • experiences/empirical results on lightweight vs. heavy-weight ontologies
  • experiences/empirical results on graphical modeling of ontologies
  • experimental evidence (e.g., from cognitive science) on conceptual modeling
  • challenges/requirements for maintenance and evolution of ontologies
  • good, best, and bad practices

• Methods for assessing ontologies
  • Ontology evaluation
  • Quality measures for ontologies
  • assessment of ontologies with regard to social agreement, formality, and appropriateness
  • experiences with assessment and evaluations methods

• Ontologies in Human Resources (Recruiting, Development, Employability)
  • modeling and representation of: Jobs, CVs, Competencies, Skills, Employees, People, Organizations, Social Events, etc.
  • HR upper level concepts
  • E-Portfolio (standards) and ontologies
  • Semantics of HR-XML
  • Semantic metadata for HR applications
  • Semantics in job matching
  • Semantics in learning technologies
  • Good/Best practices for semantics in HR
  • Maintenance of ontologies in HR

• Ontologies in E-Health and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
  • Upper level concepts of healthcare and life sciences ontologies.
  • Ontologies of diseases, nursing, therapeutics, drug, etc.
  • Ontologies and ontology-driven approaches in Ambient-Assisted Living
  • Maintenance of ontologies in e-health and AAL

If you feel that something fits into the theme of the workshop, but is not listed here, just contact the organizers.

Submissions

Types of papers include:

• research papers (max. 10 pages)
• case studies experience reports (preferrably from industry) (max 10 pages)
• position papers, clearly analyzing current state of practice for future challenges of research (max. 6 pages)

Papers submitted to OntoContent 2008 must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop or conference. All submitted papers will be evaluated by at least three members of the program committee, based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression.

Papers will be published in an LNCS volume by Springer as part of OTM 2008 proceedings. Excellent papers will be considered for a journal publication or as book chapters

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: June 15, 2008
Paper Submission Deadline: June 30, 2008
Acceptance Notification : August 15, 2008
Camera Ready Due: August 25, 2008
Registration Due: August 25, 2008
OTM Conferences: November 9 – 14, 2008

Organizers

Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany [main contact]
andreas.schmidt@fzi.de

Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus
mustafa@jarrar.info

Werner Ceusters, University of Buffalo, USA

Program Committee (partially to be confirmed and to be completed)

Bill Andersen, Ontology Works, USA
Keith Baker, University of Reading, UK
Ernst Biesalski, EnBW AG, Germany
Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy,
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Christopher Brewster, University of Sheffield, UK
Michael Brown, Skillsnet.Com
Yannis Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Ernesto Damiani, Computer Science Department, Milan University, Italy
Aldo Gangemi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
Giancarlo Guizzardi, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Mohand-Said Hacid, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 LIRIS – Villeurbanne, France
Martin Hepp, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
Stijn Heymans, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Jens Lemcke, SAP AG, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Alessandro Oltramari, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Viktoria Pammer, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Jeff Pan, University of Aberdeen, UK
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Christophe Roche, Université de Savoie, France
Peter Scheir, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Pavel Shvaiko, University of Trento, Italy
Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcalá, Spain
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT, The Netherlands
Armando Stellato, University of Roma, Italy
Andrew Stranieri, JUSTSYS, Ballarat, Australia
Karl Stroetmann, Empirica, Germany
Sergio Tessaris, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Robert Tolksdorf, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Francky Trichet, University of Nantes, France
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium

Sponsoring institutions/projects

This workshop is organized in a joint effort by the Ontology Outreach Advisory (OOA), the MATURE IP, and the SOPRANO IP.

• The OOA is an international not-for-profit association that consists of industry, government, and research leaders and innovators with respect to ontology development, use, or education. The general mission of the OOA is to develop strategies for ontology recommendation and standardization, and promote the ontology technology to industry.
• The MATURE IP is a large-scale integrating European project (FP7) in the field of technology-enhanced learning aiming at support of knowledge maturing processes within and across companies, including in particular ontology maturing.
• The SOPRANO IP is an integrated European project (FP6) in the field of ambient-assisted living and follows an ontology-driven service-oriented approach to construct a flexible and affordable platform for in-house ambient-assisted living solutions.

The last two days I was at the Professional Training Facts 2007 to present the joint work between me and Christine Kunzmann on Competency-Oriented Human Resource Development as well as a talk by colleague Simone Braun on social aspects in informal learning.

The last two days I was at Maastricht for the Human Capital & Social Innovation Summit (HCSIT 07), which encompasses among other events also the ePortfolio conference. I was invited by Luk Vervenne and the VUB STARLAB to present our competency-oriented approach together with Tobias Ley from the Know-Center, Graz and Clementina Marinoni in an OOA session. The track was aimed at bringing together researchers on the topic of competencies with a special focus on semantics and the potential influence on the HR-XML standardization. It was a promising insight that the different approaches are actually complementary, and discussions revealed that there is a high degree of mutual agreement so that we may in the future actually come to a shared framework. In the OOA session, there was attempt for online conceptual modeling, but time was way too short for such an approach so that the result was not convincing. A wrap-up is of the session is available.

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It was interesting to see that there is interest for semantic technologies from various sides, e.g., it is increasingly acknowledged that complex standards may need for their own coherence, but especially for interaction with other standards a conceptual layer on top. This is clearly inspired by model-driven ideas from software engineering. Despite this interest and remarkable awareness of ontological approaches, there is still a lot of doubt because semantic technologies still lack their applications. Probably, we need to continue to work on pragmatic and useful solutions instead of complex and powerful ones, just to show that it works and delivers a benefit.

E-Portfolios are a promising concept – for various purposed. However, I am not sure whether the single label portfolio actually denotes a shared concept and whether it is beneficial to consider all types of portfolios as instances of a single concept. For me, still, a reflective work portfolio a student at school/university actually uses as a way to organize learning is very different from a portfolio used for student assessment or for applying to a potential employer. Mixing different purposes may prevent effective usage. So for me, transfering portfolios from one system to another has no priority, but rather making it easy to transfer individual items makes sense. And this probably best in the context of a personal learning environment – and not restricted to transfer between portfolios, but also exchange with other systems so that maturing processes across individuals can take place. Anyway, I see a huge potential of bringing the e-portfolio community and the workplace learning/knowledge management community together – it can open up the perspective to holistic concepts.

The keynotes on the second day were very interesting. I was especially surprised about how quickly the Dutch government introduces innovative employability solutions, compared to the cumbersome German procedures and discussions. Especially the policy that you have to give a data about you only once to the government would be healthy. Some may have privacy concerns, but I think that much more annoying and dangerous is collecting data again and again, each time with the possibilty that a new error is introduced.

When I listened to Thomas Sporer’s talk on an eportfolio-based approach to university education, it came again to my mind how old-fashioned our university education system currently is: it does not help students in building competencies in setting goals on their own, working with uncertainty, social interaction within a project context, presentation competencies etc. Let’s hope that things will change with approaches like that one so that students become really employable at the end of their studies.

Finally, the conference was a good place for meeting interesting people with various backgrounds.

Technorati tags: eportfolio07, hcscit07

In October and November, I will present Christine Kunzmann’s and my approach to competency-oriented human resource development to different audiences:

• We were invited to present our ontology-driven approach to the HR-XML community at the Human Capital and Social Innovation Summit 2007 in Maastricht on October 17, 2007. There is a special session (organized by the Ontology Outreach Advisory), exploring the potential of semantics and competency frameworks for the future evolution of HR-XML. My talk will especially focus on competency relationships.
• At the eChallenges 2007 in Den Haag (October 24-26), I will present the approach under the special focus of sustainability (see our paper on Sustainable Competency-Oriented Human Resource Development): how can approaches based on competency ontologies actually be maintained over time. The ideas presented there are a precursor to the research in the MATURE IP.
• Christine and I were also invited to present an overview of the paradigm of competency-oriented human resource development at the Professional Training Facts 2007 on November 13 at Stuttgart. At the same event, my colleague Simone Braun was also invited to give a talk on social issues in informal learning support.

Although this will mean a lot of traveling, I am looking forward to talk with different communities, get feedback on our work, possibilities to apply them in different companies, and fresh ideas on how to continue our research.

The last two days I was at Innsbruck for attending the Microlearning 2007 conference which deals with topics similar to our context-aware workplace learning support approach in LIP. The participants had a refreshing variety of backgrounds. The concept of conference was inspired by the unconference idea with getting rid of traditional paper presentations and having speedgeeking sessions and microcafé discussions. I presented the knowledge maturing idea and the concept of maturity awareness in a seven minute slot for eight times in a row (with changing audience of 3 to 6 people). This was quite an experience, and I liked the immediacy of contact with your audience, but the short slot made it hard to convey the idea. But most of all, it was exhausting… Nevertheless, I took a lot of inspiring ideas with me, probably much more than from other conferences. At some points, I would have liked to have more in-depth presentations in addition to the overview presentations and especially more in-depth discussions (also more critical ones).

The microlearning idea – as a gist – is a metaphor for a new form of learning that is flexible, fine-grained, integrated into everyday activities. The biggest challenge is how to retain guidance, certification etc., which are still important. The maturing idea, as far as I took from the discussions, perfectly fits to this metaphor of learning.

One critical thing about the conference concept: networking was not that easy because of short breaks in between. Still it was nice to meet some people again and to encounter some interesting new ones. But definitely, the confence was worth going to.

Following a meeting at the OntoContent workshop at the OTM Federated Conferences in Montpellier, Christine Kunzmann and I were invited by Mustafa Jarrar to contribute to a roadmapping initiative on the application potential of ontologies and semantic technologies in the HR domain. This initiative is part of the Ontology Outreach Advisory of which I have become a founding member. It is an interesting compilation of the state-of-the-art in the domain and identifies several open challenges. The roadmap document is still in draft state, but you can have a look.