A Semantic Web based approach to expertise finding at KPMG

Abstract

An important requirement for realizing high organizational effectiveness within large organizations is the existence of an expertise finding application which enables rapid discovery of expertise inside the organization. The main goal of this research was to investigate how Semantic Web techniques could be used to increase the findability and accessibility of the employee expertise information inside organizations. Techniques from the Semantic Web were chosen because they are particularly suitable for integrating different data sets and allow the application to be easily extended in the future. A skills ontology has been created which defines skills from the IT Advisory domain and relates them to each other. The skills ontology is used in a proof of concept expertise finding application to illustrate that this background knowledge can be used to increase the findability and accessibility of the employee information. The employee information is expressed with RDF and the skills ontology is constructed with OWL 2 DL and contains SWRL rules which are used to infer relations between employees and skills. To demonstrate how the constructed application can be extended with external knowledge sources, a second skills ontology has been constructed and linked to the first ontology. The two ontologies can now be used jointly to enhance the discovery of expertise in the organization