Exploiting Cloud Computing in Competence Management: A Pharmacy Case

Competencies as abstractions of human's behavior in work have proven to be useful concept in making human skills, knowledge and abilities manageable. Unfortunately competence management systems are overly complex and difficult to maintain for most small organizations as they do not have enough ICT resources. Cloud computing is an interesting choice for competence management as it allows organizations to use applications without own ICT resources: Anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard browser can access an application in a cloud. We have analyzed the suitability of cloud-based competence management for pharmacies. It turned out that in pharmacies cloud computing does not only reduce the costs but it also provides new ways for sharing and exploiting competence-oriented information among relevant parties including pharmacies' staff, educational institutions and medical authorities. From technology point of view our designed cloud-based Competence Server uses OWL and RDF in managing the HR- (Human Resource) ontology. We also present how OWL ontologies can be transformed into relational model and stored in relational database systems. In addition, we analyze the suitability of various cloud deployment and service models for competence management.