Author(s)

Hans de Bruin, Gabriëlle Rossing

Research Center Expertise and Valorization Management, HZ University of Applied Sciences, Vlissingen, The Netherlands.

An Expertise Management ontology (EM_ont) is presented with which human expertise is captured. EM_ont aims at describing and collectively finding improvements for complex situations in which people interact with often conflicting worldviews in order to achieve goals, shared or not. EM_ont is rooted in systems thinking, in particular Soft Systems Methodology, to be able to accommodate stakeholders’ worldviews and activities in complex situations. Its purpose is to model human activity systems, which is illustrated with the help of a complex situation. EM_ont forms the heart of the Expertise Management Methodology (EMM). This methodology can be regarded as a framework to build bodies of knowledge for particular domains systematically. EMM favors a research process of abduction. By studying one or more situations, generalized models are developed that explain the observed phenomenon best. The models are then taken as a starting point to conduct additional studies. This cyclic process is repeated thereby strengthening the models. EM_ont has been applied in several, diverse domains such as flood protection, health care and community resilience, over a period of more than four years. In our experience, EM_ont is a stable ontology, well-suited to capture human activities and identify widely supported solutions for complex situations, and has proven its value in practice. EM_ont has been implemented in Semantic Media Wiki to publish bodies of knowledge on the web.

Ontology, Semantic Web, Expertise Management, Soft Systems Methodology

de Bruin, H. and Rossing, G. (2017) An Ontology about Expertise Management. Journal of Computer and Communications, 5, 101-120. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2017.51009.