A Competence Management System for Universities

We present an information system for storing, evaluating and reasoning about competencies of students at universities. The system is based on a fine-grained representation of skills and a competence ontology. The system supports students in planning their courses by performing a gap analysis and by producing competency profiles for job applications. The representation of profiles is based on HR-XML in order to enable an exchange of data. Referenced competencies are defined in an ontology and the presence or strength of a competency can be testified by evidences. One possible evidence described in the paper is an explicit measurement. If owners (the students) enable the access to a profile, recruitment and other companies may use these profiles to find appropriate candidates for job vacancies. Due to the sensibility of stored data we use an encrypted XML data store.