Competence ontology for domain knowledge dissemination and retrieval

In this paper, we present a competence ontology for domain knowledge dissemination and retrieval services, which has been used in the MDKT project ( Management and Dissemination of Knowledge in Telecommunication). The main objective of this project is to set up a computerized knowledge management system related to a specific domain in order to develop the human resources expertise for the needs of the enterprise. In the case of this project, the knowledge is about wireless networking and is expressed in digital documents. Among all the ontologies that implement the knowledge needed by the system, the competence ontology plays a key role. The competence ontology defines at a meta-level the concept of competence and its relationships with other concepts such as document or user. Its instantiation is used to characterize a user model and a document model. This knowledge organization makes it possible to infer which document, or more generally which domain knowledge information, is suitable for a given person or to whom specific domain knowledge information should be disseminated.