A Formal Approach to Ontology-Based Semantic Match of Skills Descriptions

Skills management has been recently acknowledged as one of the key fac- tors to adequately face the increasing competitiveness between knowledge intensive companies. In this paper we present a formal approach to Ontology-Based Semantic Matchmaking between Skills demand and supply, devised as a virtual marketplace of knowledge. In such a knowledge market metaphor, skills are a peculiar kind of good that has distinguishing characteristics with respect to traditional assets. Buyers are entities that need the skills of people, such as projects, departments and organizations; sellers are workers that offer their own skills. The formal framework supports the semantic match of descriptions provided by de- manders and sellers of skills. In particular our approach, based on Description Log- ics formalization and reasoning, overcomes simple subsumption matching and allows match ranking and categorization. The implementation of the approach in a prototype system, which embeds a NeoClassic reasoner, is also described.