Semantic skillmatching in Open Source Hardware (OSH) Project Communites

• This repository handles the third workpackage (WP3) of the OPEN!NEXT project to serve possible solutions for Open Source Hardware Commmunity needs.
• OPEN!NEXT received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 869984.
• Skillmatching as a measure of community management was identified, which is the main focus here.
  For this, a generic ontology model of a possible open souce hardware project landscape was developed.
  The implementation of the ontology took results from a previous project (OPEN!) into account that also analysed processes and dynamics of OSH community.
• Purpose of the ontology model is to fulfill the concepted user stories defined below.

USER STORIES

To gather the needs of the OSH community, expert interviews have been conducted. The team derived user stories from the input of those interviews.
User Stories of the D3.1 deliverable of the project can be accessed here

Two main user stories are scope of the case:

1. I, as a user of some OSH management platform, am interested in learning some skill (or want to help and can provide a certain skill) and want to find projects with issues where this is addressed.
2. I, as project manager/member, need help to do a task requiring a certain skill and want to find people to help me or do the task.

CURRENT STATUS

• Currently the ontology model is the first draft and has to be validated with OSH project data.
• Afterwards possible adaptions will taken into account.
• The repository will be updated respectively over time.

ONTOLOGY MODEL

For customization reasons, the ontology model consists of three ontologies referring to each other but are therefore replacable necessary:

1. Open source hardware product development (OSHPD) ontology

   • This OWL ontology holds the architecture and semantic restrictions of the project landscape
   • Main classes for the skillmatching case are "Person", "Project", "Task" and "Skill", that are related through properties.
   • Property restrictions arise from the use cases before mentioned
   • The OSHPD ontology imports the skill ontology

2. Skill ontology

   • This OWL ontology is based on the ESCO skill hierarchy
   • The ESCO hierarchy was cropped to the topics of mechanics, electrics/electronics, furniture and cars/mobiliy.
   • Afterwards a reclustering was done for ease of use purposes
   • The skill ontology is still to be validated with OSH project data

3. Instantiation file

   • This file holds needed project data of the individuals
   • The file refers to and uses class and property expressions from the other two ontologies.

ONTOLOGY RESTRICTIONS

Based on the user stories, prevalidation workshops were held. The results specified the scope and functionality that is to be implemented:

• I, as a person/user/contributor, add my skills to my profile to show others
• I recieve notifications of invitations/open calls matching my skills
• I recieve notifications or suggestions for projects with people with whom I have already worked on.
  This specifically does not contain to the skill matching focus but is often mentioned. This interpreted indicates a need for priorisation of the skill matching (e.g. a first suggestions for a match will be from the circle of acquaintances rather than the whole community).

INSTRUCTIONS TO USE

• The ontologies are provided publicly here on the repository and therefore can be referenced by their namespaces.
• If you want to use them locally, do not forget to rereference them by chaning their namespaces to the new location (file path or URL).

CODE

Code to handle, instantiate, query and reason the ontology model is in development (in coordination with other project parties) and will be uploaded soon.