IYS Skills Ontology design takes into consideration the variables that go into skills profiling, fluid natures of skills organization and complexities of relationships in the skills landscape.
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While discussing the issues in skills, we took into the challenges of charting the skills space poses, due to various factors such as lack of a structure for organization, lack of clear boundaries between groups and others.
One can revisit these here:
The Skills Ontology has been designed to address all these challenges. Here is a depiction of how the skills are organized. The design gives flexibility at node level to create different kinds of relationships such as siblings, relatives (cousins, nephews, uncles) and also friends :)
Getting the design conceptually and technical is one part of the problem with organization. There are two other problems. Curating and organizing the skills as per this design. And there has been the rendering them in a an easy-for-user-to-use manner. The organizing of skills is a complex process. Lets go through the process of construction of the Taxonomy. Step 1: All the terms referring to skills as per definition (knowledge, tools & technologies, domain, activities, roles, soft skills and certifications) are added into a table. Thesaurus is created here i.e. equating terms for similar meaning.
Step 2: The terms are now grouped based on relevance. For example, all Programming Languages together, Languages together and Graphic Design tools together.
Step 3: Here there are multiple sub steps are involved:
adding skills or skills groups under a skill
identifying which all skills and skills groups, from the entire skills landscape, that may have relationship with a particular node
classifying what the relationships with the skill should be, should they be siblings, relatives or friends and appropriately organizing them
giving the skills properties such as rating scale (there are other properties but we will not get into them here)
The whole process is, as of now human intelligence based. In the course of time hopefully we will be able to graduate to a programmatic one. Rules of associations for different scenarios are still emerging and it is too early to craft a programmatic way of organizing the skills. There are rules and checks to ensure data quality.
The second complexity involved was in the design to render the skills organization in the front end. After several trials we have finally got a design for the frontend which addresses the complexity of the organization of skills and kept the users' ease and also the need to engage and ensure the user is led to create a comprehensive and holistic profile.
