Modeling and management of profiles and competencies in VBEs

Abstract

Virtual organization Breeding Environments (VBEs) are long-term clusters/associations of autonomous and geographically dispersed organizations in the market and society. The VBE aims to prepare its member organizations and enhance their readiness for potential involvement in opportunity-based Virtual Organizations (VOs). Organizing/management of profiles is a key activity in VBEs. The need for management of profiles is even larger in mediumsize and large-size VBEs (e.g. with more then 50 members), where typically the member organizations do not have the chance of getting to know all others directly. Furthermore, uniform structuring/modeling of the mostly textual content of profiles enables their processing by the software that supports variety of VBE functionality. An important element of the profiles in VBEs is the competency. There is no consensus on the definition of competency and the existing literature associate it with a range of tangible characteristics such as resources and products, as well as intangible characteristics such as knowledge and motivation. This paper introduces and details a unified/generic model for VBE profiles and VBE competencies. It further addresses the design of an adaptable, replicable and sustainable Profile and Competency Management System (PCMS), which is being developed supported by the ontology for profiles and competencies. An approach and mechanism for semi-automated derivation/discovery of elements for organization's profile and competency from online text corpora is also introduced.

Systematic Analysis of Information Management Challenges within Long-Term Collaborative Networks

“…A few existing VBEs handle digitised profiles and competencies of their members [3]. Furthermore, while every VBE stores profiles of their members, which represent a variety of characteristics about their member organisations, only a few of them store some details about competencies of their members.…”

“…In this research [3], we collaborated with a number of existing 1 st generation VBEs from Europe and Latin America. Namely, we studied their current practices, identified their requirements, and deployed and validated our developments in their environments to bring them towards their 2 nd generation.…”

Competence Mining for Collaborative Virtual Enterprise

“…Several research work deal with the formalization of characteristic data concerning potential partners for networked organizations (Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh 2003, Plisson.J et al 2007, Ermilova & Afsarmanesh 2007. Most of these approaches are adapted to a semi-closed environment defined by a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE).…”

Competency Modeling Targeted on Promotion of Organizations Towards VO Involvement

“…This system, called PCMS (Profile and Competency Management System) (Ermilova & Afsarmanesh, 2007), offers specific functionality and services for competency management based on the prepared competency model. These aim to process different aspects of the competency, introduced in the 4C-model, as well as to provide effective web-interfaces and web-services for both human and software access and processing of competency related information.…”