Skill ontology is a structured resource on skills. Ontology is not merely a collection or a list or a database. To better understand skills ontology, it’s necessary to first comprehend the basic problem it aims to solve.

The tacit knowledge, personal competencies, and skills of the employees are the most important resources of a company for solving knowledge-intensive tasks such as decision-making, strategic planning or creative design. Therefore, establishing an electronically accessible repository of people’s capabilities is critical so as to achieve organizational goals.

There are few issues that directly affect the information on Skill ontology such as incomplete or partial information, issue with semantics, textual and unstructured nature of resumes and JDs and lack of quantification in proficiencies.

Incomplete or Partial Information:

Almost all the functions or works that are issued by the organization to an employee is totally based on the information the employee provides to the organization. Not only false information, incomplete or partial information can cause various change and cause various kinds of problems to the organization to plan or work. Providing incomplete or partial information by the employee to the Human Resource can also affect in the hiring process of the company.

Issues with Semantics:          

Semantics is the branch of Linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.  The two main areas are logistical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference, presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them. Different people could call or write the same thing in different ways.

Textual and unstructured nature of resumes and JDs:

Parsers may do a good job on demographic information. However, when it comes to parsing skills they are inefficient given the complexity of words, the manner in which different people write the same thing, the different forms and formats in which the resumes and JDs are presented.

Lack of qualification in proficiencies:

The most common form of data that one would get from resumes and jobs descriptions alike is the experience level. This is the easiest to articulate. But this it isn’t wholly relevant or complete. Different skills are articulated in different ways when it comes to proficiencies.

The skills ontology tries to bring a rich recourse where skills are organized in a such manner that we can articulate, analyze and inner information on skills in a universally understood in a meaningful and simple manner. To achieve the organizational goals, these challenges needs to be addressed at the root level, hence from recruit to retrench, organizations will be working with ineffective mediocre processes.  For your organization’s, digital HR transformation of HR, Check out It’s Your Skill’s high performing skill ontology, Skill mapping,  Skill profiling process and let us know the feedback.