International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. x, No. x, xxxx 1 ProLink: A Semantics-based Social Network for Soft- ware Projects Juan Miguel Gómez Berbis, Ricardo Colomo Palacios*, Ángel García Crespo, Belén Ruiz Mezcua Computer Science Department, Carlos III University, Av Universidad 30, Leganés (Madrid), SPAIN Fax: +34 91 624 94 30 E-mail: {juanmiguel.gomez, ricardo.colomo, angel.garcia, be- len.ruiz}@uc3m.es *Corresponding author Abstract: One of the core challenges in the IT world is to harness the possibili- ties of reusing knowledge, expertise and lessons learned from previous soft- ware projects. In this paper, we present ProLink, a semantic-based social net- work, a proof-of-concept architecture and implementation of how this approach could foster expertise sharing and its potentially tremendous impact on work organisation and software development. Keywords: Social Networks, Semantics, Competency, Software Projects, Staffing Biographical notes: Juan Miguel Gomez is a Visiting Professor at the Com- puter Science Department of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway and received his MSc in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). He was involved in several EU FP V and VI research projects and was a member of the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI). His research inter- ests include semantic web, semantic web services, business process modelling, b2b integration and, recently, bioinformatics. Ricardo Colomo has been a Faculty Member of the Computer Science Depart- ment at Carlos III Technical University of Madrid since 2002. His research in- terests include Software Process Improvement, Software Project Management Copyright © 200x Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Gómez, J.M.; Colomo, R.; García, A. & Ruiz, B. and Information Systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Universidad Politécnica of Madrid (2005). He also holds a MBA from the Insti- tuto de Empresa (2002). He has been working as software engineer, project manager and software engineering consultant in several companies including Spanish IT leader INDRA. Angel García-Crespo is the Head of the SofLab Group at the Computer Science Department in the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the Head of the Insti- tute for promotion of Innovation Pedro Juan de Lastanosa. He holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Award from the Instituto J.A. Artigas to the best thesis) and received an Executive MBA from the Instituto de Empresa. Professor García-Crespo has led and ac- tively contributed to large European Projects of the FP V and VI, and also in many business cooperations. He is the author of more than a hundred publica- tions in conferences, journals and books, both Spanish and international. Belen Ruiz Mezcua is a Lecturer at the Computer Science Department of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She holds a PhD in Sciences Physics from the Telecommunications School of Polytechnic University of Madrid. She is sub-head of Institute for promotion of Innovation Pedro Juan de Lastanosa. Her research interests are focused on speech and she works in, and manages, several International Projects. She is co-author of several publications in refereed in- ternational journals and conferences. 1. Introduction Software development is hardly a linear process. Failure rates in software projects are high and the qualified software engineers able to deal with software development pro- cesses and their shortcomings and caveats (Pressman, 2005) represent a scarce resource. The heterogeneous training, background and expertise required to the professionals who join software development teams (McConnell, 2003) pose special challenges to human resource managers, who are called to apprise complex competences and stimulate their continuous development (Curtis, Hefley & Miller, 2001). At the same time, the ever-changing nature of Information Technology (IT) provides the ideal test bed for acquiring the needed knowledge, experience and expertise at different organisations. This can be achieved by means of sharing resources, for example, through social networks. The conceptualisation of social networks as distributed repositories of knowledge is not new, yet the availability of technology that allows tracking required competences, skills and expertise could greatly enhance their potential. In this work, we argue that semantic technology is an effective solution to find, analyze and identify skills, experience and expertise, and, more practically, software projects sharing similar challenges and goals. We present ProLink, a semantics-based social net- work that fosters the potential of semantics and social networks to reuse, share and gain the aforementioned knowledge, experience and expertise. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 surveys the relevant litera- ture and presents a conceptual model for competence and competence management. Sec- tion 3 describes social networks, discusses ongoing IT-based developments and presents ProLink: A Semantics-based Social Network for Software Projects the Description of a Project (DOAP) ontology as a useful knowledge source. Section 4 sketches how the ProLink architecture and implementation fits in the picture. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper. 2. The Competence Paradigm & Competence Management The competence approach to human resources management has a long history. The early Romans already practiced a sort of competence profiling in attempts to detail the attrib- utes of a “good Roman soldier” (Draganidis & Mentzas, 2006, p.52). More recently, the concept of competence was used by early 20th century scientific management (Taylor, 1911) and later revised and redefined by McClelland, former Hay Group director, in the early seventies. According to McClelland (1973), competence concerns the relation be- tween humans and work tasks: rather than knowledge and skills themselves, competence involves the knowledge and skills required to perform a specific job or task in an efficient way. From the sixties, and due to the ever-growing diffusion of the competence paradigm in business environments, the large number of proposed definitions made several authors claim they were facing a “competence pandemonium” (DeHaro, 2004). In a recent survey of Competence Management (CM), Draganidis & Mentzas (2006) state that a compe- tence could be defined in terms of: Category. A group to which homogeneous and/or similar competences belong. Name. A descriptive name for the specific competence. Definition. Statement(s) that explains the basic concept of this competence. Demonstrated behaviour. Conduct indicators which demonstrate the acquisition of the specified competence. According to the People Capability Maturity Model (Curtis, Hefley & Millar, 2001), competence management is a collection of employee management practices used to en- hance the capability of the workforce to perform their tasks and to achieve the assigned competency growth objectives. CM is becoming more and more important in today’s or- ganizations. The employees’ competence levels are important to achieve company goals and play a complementary role to, for instance, core business processes, customer rela- tionships and financial issues (Norton & Kaplan, 1996). Based on a survey of CM sys- tems, Draganidis & Mentzas (2006) point out that competences are capital in the follow- ing employee management applications: Workforce planning, Recruitment management, Learning management, Performance management, Career development and Succession planning. Following the increasing importance of CM, an ever-increasing number of commercial Information Systems include CM modules. Based on a survey of commercial CM sys- tems, Draganidis & Mentzas (2006) outline that open standards (XML, web services, RDF), semantic technologies (ontologies and the semantic web) and portals with self- service technologies represent the most extensively researched areas for the development of those applications. In particular, semantic technologies will be further discussed in the following sections. Gómez, J.M.; Colomo, R.; García, A. & Ruiz, B. The scientific literature reports several initiatives to implement Knowledge Management systems and, particularly, CM systems in software engineering (Rus, & Lindvall, 2002), (Lindgren, Stenmark, & Ljungberg, 2003), (Aurum, Parkin, & Cox, 2004), (Ward, & Au- rum, 2004), (Dingsøyr, Djarraya & Røyrvik, 2005). Human Factors represent one of the most important areas of improvement in Software Engineering (SE). Boehm points out that "After product size, people factors have the strongest influence in determining the amount of effort required to develop a software product " (Boehm, 1981), and "Personnel attributes and Human Resource activities provide by far the largest source of opportunity for improving software development productivity" (Boehm, Horowitz, Madachy, Reifer, Clark, Steece, Brown, Chulani, & Abts, 2000). However, CM systems for Social Net- works still represent an under-researched field which and thanks to the progressive glob- alization of software development companies constitutes an interesting development area, since they will offer the possibility of searching, locating and sharing human resources all around the world, wherever they are needed by a project, a company or an organization. 3. Semantics-based