The domain of Human Resources is characterized, from a knowledge perspective, by a few aspects that together create a particularly difficult automation problem.

HR tries hard to quantify and qualify the common knowledge that people must have to have meaningful conversations about human resources. The common language of jobs, function descriptions, and vacancies is well worked out. Task-level descriptions, where multiple tasks combine into one job or vacancy, are becoming standard as well. However, below the task level, there is the competency level which at least for now looks like the level of the smallest useful building brick. Further division of competencies seems pointless right now. If we could work with competencies all over the HR domain, it would be a natural granularity to describe, plan, assess, and train human resources and exchange these details all over the industry.

The mission of the OOA-HR chapter is to promote the semantic technology into HR/e-learning standards and applications. The current focus topics of the OOA-HR chapter includes:

• Semantic interoperability
• HR upper level concepts
• Semantics of HR-XML
• Semantic metadata for HR applications
• Semantics in job matching
• Semantics in learning technologies
• Modeling and representation of: Jobs, CVs, Competencies, Skills, Employees, People, Organizations, Social Events, etc.
• Multilinguality in human resources ontologies
• Best practice and semantic patterns in ontology modeling and evaluation.

Contact:
Luk Vervenne, Luk.Vervenne@Ontology-Advisory.org , The OOA-HR Chair

Ongoing Activities:
• The OOA HR-Semantics Roadmap
• The Human Capital & Social Innovation Technology Summit
• The OnToContent 2007 workshop

Previous Activities:
• The OOA-HR Kick-off workshop
• Seminar on Competence Ontologies
• The HR-Semantics workshop
• The OnToContent 2006 workshop