ExpertFinder 2fEFW2007 2fSlot1 5fIndustrialNeedsForExpertFinding

From FOAF

This group discussed real industrial needs for expert finding

Responsible to report: LuisPolo

We started off to discuss general use cases and scenarios for ExpertFinder initiative in the context of industry and enterprises. José Arancón provided particular needs and own experiences in Arcelor.

It seems justified to apply efforts to centralize and share Human Resources information. Semantic Web technology could bring together Human Resources Management, networking and Internet scenarios, like e-Recruitment. Activities like personnel recruitment or human resources management handle the same objects: people, qualifications, skills, etc.

We identified several use cases that can should decomposed with more granularity:

1.- e-Recruitment

The e-Recruitment is a complex use case that can be divided in many tasks.

- Recruitment process: There are three main phases in a typical recruitment process in which semantic annotations can help to automate the pre-selection of potential candidates: describing the requirements of the job position, publishing the job position and decision making (description, discovery and evaluation of candidates). Semantic description of CVs and job positions involve: kinds of skills (hard/soft), taxonomies of skills, experience, education and general issues. The system would exploit this information to infer suitable candidates.

- Expert assignment: Internal mobility is common and has similar principles to a recruitment process. Continuously, posts frequently need to be filled with the Human Resources existing in the company. A semantic-based platform can use techniques similar to those of e-Recruitment, to help in the discovery and assignment of “the appropriate employee”.

In addition, in the context of a big company, technical experts are geographically scattered around the world. Sometimes working groups for a certain task must be assigned in a short time period. So, employee description inside an enterprise shall also consider situational aspects and distributed information along different sources of information.

- Skill gap analysis: For companies and governments skill gap analysis is a crucial task. By obtaining skill gaps of employees or unemployees, their educational skills could be improved in order to achieve a better position into a government/company or to get a job (specially important in the case of employment agencies). Also sometimes law changes obliges

- The initiative also needs a Specific Vocabulary for Organization structure. The ExpertFinder should provide means to completely describe organizations. It would be a tool for organizing the key concepts of the enterprise, necessary for many human resources relationships: departments, projects, activities, working groups, etc. In this structure, an element of an organization is not isolated from the organization itself and relationships are not rigid but temporal (i.e., the current hierarchical position of an employee in a company is a variable attribute).

2.- Expert Knowledge Management Tool

Multinational companies lack knowledge management tools capable of handling a vast amount of knowledge from different sources (technical documentation, operation manuals, forums, wikies, mailboxes, web pages,…) in different formats (plain text, Microsoft word®, OpenOffice, PDF, XHTML,…). Capitalization of knowledge is a priority for companies with complicated production processes which need deep know-how not only about the processes itself but also about the problems which may appear.

A collaborative framework to exploit different sources of knowledge, put and solve problems in common will improve the quality of the final products what, in the end, results in cost reducing costs.

We have to consider different aspects we should be able to express:

     -	Content description: topics.
     -	Experts skills.
     -	Level of confidence: how to trust on the contents?
     -	Content accessibility: Access rights.

3.- Networked Enterprises

Relationships among companies have an enormous impact in a globalized market. There are several scenarios where this information can provide an added value to the enterprise: - Market surveillance - Analysis of competitors - Partner search - Supply chain search