Modeling Collaborative Design Competence with Ontologies

Collaborative design in dispersed groups of engineers creates various kinds of challenges to technology, organization and social environment. Selected examples are knowledge sharing, coordination support or secure tool integration (Jacucci, Pawlak, & Sandkuhl, 2005). Work presented in this chapter is located in the area of formation of teams for collaborative design. The challenge addressed is how to describe and represent the competences needed for a planned collaborative design project in a way that those individuals best suited for the collaboration can be identified. The proposed approach is to apply ontology engineering to modeling competences of individuals, including different competence areas like cultural competences, professional competences or occupational competences. The next section will present some related work in competence modeling and provide background for our work. The second section describes selected results from an empirical investigation in the field of information use, which confirms the importance of competence when selecting partners for collaboration activities. The forth section will introduce the structure of competence models with focus on specific elements for collaborative design. The representation of competence models with ontologies and the results of modeling of a software design team are described in the next section. The two last sections present an outlook on future work and a summary of the results.