A Semantic Model for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises to Support

Organizational Learning

Ala Atrash, Marie-H

ene Abel and Claude Moulin

Heudiasyc, UMR CNRS 7253, Universit

e de Technologie de Compi

egne,

Centre de Recherches de Royallieu, BP 20529, 60205 Compiegne Cedex, France

Keywords:

Organizational Learning, Small and Medium-sized Enterprise, Ontology, Semantic Modeling, Enterprise

Modeling.

Abstract:

Many efforts have been made in the last two decades to manage knowledge in organizations, especially tacit

knowledge which is difﬁcult to transfer to others as contrary to explicit knowledge. Organizational learning

plays a great role in capitalizing such expertise in organizations. Large enterprises can spend high budgets

on the organizational learning process which is not the case in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs)

where organizational learning is not supported due to the missing of standardized and codiﬁed technical sup-

ports. So there is a special need for SMEs to organize their knowledge and to facilitate the access of infor-

mation. In this paper, we present the Organizational learning and its speciﬁcations in SMEs. We also present

TOVE and Enterprise projects from which we deﬁned a semantic model specially dedicated to SMEs. We

explain the choice of the MEMORAe organizational memory platform to manage knowledge in SMEs.

1 INTRODUCTION

Organizational learning is a property which emerges

from sharing knowledge and practices of the mem-

bers in an organization. It is an accumulative process

based on an organizational knowledge resulting from

the accumulated experience. In order for this knowl-

edge to be shared all over the organization, it must

be communicable, consensual and integrable (Dun-

can, 1979). According to (Chen et al., 2003), being

communicable means that knowledge must be repre-

sented in an easily comprehensible and distributable

way. Being consensual implies that this organiza-

tional knowledge must be valid and useful for all

members of the organization. Being integrable means

that its representation could be saved in an organiza-

tional memory which must be consistent, accessible

and well maintained. The process of organizational

learning is affected by the size of the organization. In

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), the ex-

pertise is limited to a small number of persons and to

only one individual in some cases (Nicolas, 2003). As

a consequence, there is a strong dependence on some

actors of the organization. The smaller an organiza-

tion is, the more we recognize an increment of the

relative “weight” of each individual (Mahe de Bois-

landelle, 1996). As a result, it is difﬁcult to transmit

know-how and know-why knowledge, managing the

turnover and integrating new knowledge to the orga-

nization. Most of the research studies have focused on

the process of learning within the large organizations

(Thorpe et al., 2005) and has not been done much on

small organizations where the organizational learning

faces a lot of difﬁculties. This paper will focus on

the organizational learning process in a special type

of organizations called SMEs following a knowledge

engineering approach in order to develop a collabora-

tion platform dedicated to organizational learning in

SMEs.

In sections two, three we deﬁne the organization

and the organizational learning respectively. “Tour

Equipement” case study and the details of MEMO-

RAe platform are described in section four. Related

works, mainly TOVE and Enterprise projects, are pre-

sented in section ﬁve. We propose a model and a com-

plete usage scenario in section six.

2 WHAT IS AN ORGANIZATION?

2.1 General Characteristics

(Weber et al., 1978) views the organization as a set of

constraints on the activities performed by its agents.

Max Weber believes that all organizations have a well

476

Atrash A., Abel M. and Moulin C..

A Semantic Model for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises to Support Organizational Learning.

DOI: 10.5220/0004624804760483

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval and the International Conference on Knowledge

Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2013), pages 476-483

ISBN: 978-989-8565-75-4

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

deﬁned hierarchy with levels controlling sub-levels.

Every employee must have the competency to ac-

complish the task to which he/she was employed for.

Rules and regulations must be implemented in the or-

ganization to avoid the management based on self-

interest and personalities. This implies an impersonal

relationship between managers and employees which

will facilitate the decision making procedure and the

evaluation of the employees’ outcomes.

2.2 Small and Medium-sized

Enterprises (SMEs)

According to The European Commission (EC), an en-

terprise is considered medium-sized if it has less than

250 salaried, and small-sized if it has less than 50

salaried. In addition, there are two other criteria to

choose from: either the annual turnover must not ex-

ceed 50 million euro or the total balance sheet must

not exceed 43 million euro (Commission Recommen-

dation of 6 May 2003).

3 ORGANIZATIONAL

LEARNING

The dictionary deﬁnition of learning is the acquir-

ing of information, knowledge or skill. (Argyris

and Sch

on, 1978) differentiates between two types

of learning: single-loop learning and double-loop

learning. The single-loop learning is based on the

detection-correction principle. This means that a

modiﬁcation of actions is made according to a com-

parison between the desired and the obtained out-

come. The double-loop learning happens when the

entity is able to view or modify all the assumptions,

policies and values that led to the speciﬁc action (the

root cause of the action). In an organizational context,

there are two levels of learning: 1- operational which

is a single-loop learning that consists of correcting ac-

tions to obtain better results, 2- management which is

a double-loop learning that involves the correction of

errors at a higher level. If we take the example of a

team in an enterprise having problems in meeting the

project deadline. Increasing the working hours per

day could be an example of single-loop learning. Al-

though there is a slight improvement, the investiga-

tions showed that the team structure and communi-

cations between each other also affects the team not

meeting the deadline. It is therefore this issue that is

the root cause of the problem (double-loop learning).

3.1 SMEs Speciﬁcations

The process of organizational learning is affected by

the size of the enterprise and according to (Nicolas,

2003) the organizational learning within small struc-

tures is very speciﬁc and needs a non-traditional ap-

proach. We notice a direct supervision and coordina-

tion in SMEs which is contrary to large enterprises

where the coordination is procedural and codiﬁed.

The standardized and codiﬁed technical supports (nu-

meric or paper versions) which are present in large en-

terprises support the process of organizational learn-

ing. Such standardized technical supports are missing

in SMEs. In addition, the interaction is more codiﬁed

in large enterprise (e.g. regular group meetings) than

in SMEs.

A way of learning in SMEs is explained in (Lima

and Filion, 2011) who considers SME as either a be-

havioral system or an interpretation system. In a be-

havioral system, the members’ short-term behavior is

affected by the feedback of impacts generated from

other members’ action. In an interpretation system,

the members search for information throughout the

enterprise’s environment, interpret this information

and learn by generating knowledge.

(TSAI, 2009) view that there are three aspects to

take into consideration for organizational learning in

SMEs: individuals (especially the owners-managers),

internal routines and external networks. Firstly, the

owners-managers play a big role in the enterprise.

They are responsible for the decision making and their

knowledge has an impact on the internal and exter-

nal learning resources. Secondly, the internal rou-

tines also affect the learning process in the enterprise.

These routines include organizational culture in ad-

dition to the internal relationships. Finally, external

networks include all external resources that inﬂuence

the organizational knowledge.

(Gray and Gonsalves, 2002) divided the organiza-

tional learning in SMEs into three dimensions. The

ﬁrst dimension is Personal Cognitive Learning (PCL)

which includes all enterprise activities that consider

the members as individual learners. It focuses on the

knowledge that resides in individuals’ minds. Its con-

tent mainly comes from what members already know

and their past experiences. The second dimension is

Social Constructive Learning (SCL). It includes all

enterprise activities that consider the members as so-

cial individuals. In this case, members share their

knowledge in every day communications and inter-

actions with other members of the enterprise. The

third dimension is an extension of the second one.

It is the Institutional Constructive Learning (ICL). In

this dimension, knowledge is developed when enter-

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prise members take part in the construction of some-

thing external to themselves or considered universal’

to their enterprise (e.g. formal procedures, organiza-

tional charts, support systems, authority structure).

3.2 The Need for Organizational

Learning in SMEs

The following summarize why do SMEs have a spe-

cial need to implement the organizational learning:

• Individuals in SMEs can play different roles at

same time because of their small number. For ex-

ample, a member can be both a technical manager

and designer. This results in a high dependence

on members in the enterprise which makes their

replacement very difﬁcult and critical to the en-

terprise.

• Direct supervision and coordination is found in

SMEs due to the small size. In addition, oral com-

munication is present between members. As a

consequence, the codiﬁed and standardized sup-

ports are missing and are only present in the ac-

tions of the enterprise members. So there is no

trace of what had been done or decided for a par-

ticular issue.

The two previous points illustrate that there is an ur-

gent need to organize the knowledge in SMEs. The

knowledge must be codiﬁed and easily accessible by

the members at any time.

4 “TOUR EQUIPEMENT” CASE

STUDY

“Tour Equipement” is a small enterprise (14 salaried)

in the Picardy region, France. It has more than 50

years of experience in the mechanical production.

Our team visited the enterprise to take a close look

about all processes in order to precisely identify the

need for organizational learning in this enterprise.

All examples in this article will be based on “Tour

Equipement” enterprise.

4.1 The Choice of MEMORAe

Approach

The MEMORAe approach deﬁnes a model and an

environment to manage all heterogeneous resources

of knowledge in an organization. MEMORAe uses

an ontology-based reference called (mc2) to support

knowledge capitalization in an organization. Follow-

ing a knowledge engineering approach, the resources

are organized in an organizational memory based on

ontologies (Abel et al., 2004). It views the organi-

zation as a set of individuals organized in groups in

order to exchange information resources and share

knowledge via documentary and social resources in-

dexed by “job speciﬁcations”. Knowledge may be

accessed from different workspaces and according to

different viewpoints. mc2 is represented using the

OWL (Ontology Web Language) which is a W3C

(World Wide Web Consortium) standard. In such lan-

guage, we are able to deﬁne concepts and relations be-

tween these concepts. mc2’s main interest is to model

the resource sharing in an organization. It focuses on

resource concepts, groups of individuals and the shar-

ing spaces in which we can share a speciﬁc resource.

mc2 ontology model makes use of three other ontol-

ogy models (Deparis et al., 2011):

1. Sioc (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communi-

ties): It aims to enable the integration of online

community information.

2. Foaf (Friend of a friend): It describes persons,

their activities and their relations to other people

and objects.

3. Bibo (Bibliographic): It describes the biblio-

graphic resources.

4.1.1 MEMORAe Platform

E-MEMORAe 2.0 is a web platform that follows

MEMORAe approach for resource sharing. One of

the strengths of MEMORAe platform is its complete

integration of all the features needed to host a server

for collaboration and knowledge capitalization. It is

not a combination of different software that offers the

desired functionalities. A semantic map (see ﬁgure

1) is presented to access private or shared resources

from a formal or informal process within individu-

als’ group (team, department, project organization,

etc.). The use of a semantic map allows us to de-

ﬁne a common reference in which it is possible to

navigate and to access the capitalized resources in

different spaces according to their semantic descrip-

tion. Any resource can be indexed by its content (the

concepts it addresses) or its meta (author, creation

date, etc.). The knowledge map represents a semantic

back-bone/reference. The semantic backbone links

working space with social and learning space. The

focus on the map allows the users to view in parallel

all the resources that it indexes distributed in the shar-

ing spaces which are accessible by the user. These

resources may come from a chat, a document, a wiki,

a calendar, etc. The platform has sharing spaces that

display a set of shared resources by the members of

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this space. Each user has a private space, only accessi-

ble by him. The parallel view of sharing spaces facil-

itates the transfer of resources from one sharing space

to another by means of “drag and drop”. The same

resource can be visible in different spaces, however it

is stored in a single place. MEMORAe platform was

chosen because it supports the organizational learn-

ing by focusing on resource exchange and knowledge

sharing via documentary and social resources indexed

by job reference. On the other hand, this approach did

not take into account other aspects of the organiza-

tion. For example, it does not model the organization

hierarchy structure, or the activity of the organization.

For that reason, we aim to exploit TOVE and Enter-

prise projects that study different aspects of the orga-

nization including the resource itself.

4.1.2 Organizational Learning based on

Document Resource Annotation

The annotation of documents plays a great role in

knowledge capitalization. An annotation is a note as-

sociated with a particular target. The target can be a

collection of documents, a document or a document

segment (a paragraph, a group of words, an image,

etc.). From the point of view of psycholinguistics and

cognitive scientists, annotation is a trace of the men-

tal state of the reader and a record of his/her reac-

tions face-to-face with the document. So the annota-

tion turns the “reader” into an “active reader”. MEM-

ORAe approach adopts the annotation as a way of

expressing tacit knowledge like thinking, judgment,

opinion etc. For example, the product speciﬁcations

document can be annotated, discussed and sent to the

agent who has the appropriate role to start or achieve

the manufacturing activity. This later agent may place

all the commands to supply the resources needed for

the manufacturing activity based on exchanges be-

tween individuals: Who is talking to whom? Who

shares what with whom? Who can intervene in the

process and with which role? Each human agent must

leave a trace of choices and reﬂections emitted during

the activity. All members as belonging to the same

group can exchange their knowledge to improve the

manufacturing process.

On the other hand, MEMORAe is not oriented to

a special type of organization. As a consequence, for

SMEs, it does not take into consideration the structure

of the organization (roles and authority), activities and

plans, machines as part of SMEs manufacturing pro-

cess, marketing and strategy, product quality and cost

and juristic representation. Taking the machines as an

example, they participate in the manufacturing activ-

ity as being resources to it. The way of representing

a resource machine as an object that participates in

activities is not present in mc2 model.

5 ENTERPRISE MODELING

According to (Fox and Gruninger, 1998) An En-

terprise model is “a computational representation

of: structure, activities, processes, information, re-

sources, people, behavior, goals, and constraints of

a business, government, etc.”

Two major enterprise models have been studied:

The “TOVE project” (TOronto Virtual Enterprise)

and the “Enterprise project”.

5.1 TOVE (TOronto Virtual Enterprise)

The TOVE project is ﬁrst proposed by (Fox, 1992)

who outlined the goals of TOVE project in four

points:

“

1. It provides a shared terminology for the enterprise

in a way that every application can understand and

use.

2. The ﬁrst-order logic is used to deﬁne the mean-

ing (semantics) of each term in a precise and an

unambiguous as possible manner.

3. The PROLOG ((PROgramming in LOGic) ax-

ioms are used to implement the semantics in order

to enable TOVE to automatically deduce the an-

swer to many commonsense questions about the

enterprise.

4. It deﬁnes a symbology for depicting a term, or the

concept constructed thereof, in a graphic context.

”

TOVE models the enterprise as a set of integrated

ontologies. Currently these ontologies are:

1. Activity, time, and causality (Gruninger and

Pinto, 1995) (Gruninger and Fox, 1994)

2. Resources (Fadel et al., 1994)

3. Cost (Tham et al., 1994)

4. Quality (Kim et al., 1994)

5. Organization structure (Fox et al., 1995)

6. Product (Lin et al., 1996)

5.2 Enterprise Project

The role of the enterprise project as speciﬁed in

(Uschold et al., 1998) is to act as a communication

medium between:

• People across different enterprises.

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Figure 1: The semantic map in MEMORAe platform.

• People and implemented computational systems.

• Different Implemented computational systems

(like DBMS (database management system) for

example).

The enterprise model deﬁnes the concepts that

could be found in an enterprise and all the relations

between these concepts. Enterprise ontology model

is divided into ﬁve main sections:

• Meta ontology and time: The concepts of Meta

ontology are used to describe other concepts in

the ontology in addition to time.

• Activity and processes: These concepts describe

everything in the enterprise that concerns activi-

ties.

• Organization: The main two concepts deﬁned

here are Organization Unit (OU) and Legal-Entity.

• Strategy: This concept is related to strategic

purposes and goals that the enterprise aims to

achieve.

• Marketing: This concept deﬁnes everything

which is related to sale (e.g. market, customer,

product etc.).

6 A SEMANTIC MODEL FOR

SMEs

We aim to enrich (mc2) model with new concepts that

meet the needs of SMEs. We started by resources

and activities as they are essential to the enterprise.

We took into consideration the deﬁnition of these two

concepts in TOVE and Enterprise projects.

6.1 Resource Modeling

We are interested in all types of resources in SMEs as

being an element key in the modeling process. mc2

considers the resource as a “vector of information”.

There are two types of resources in mc2 ontology:

simple resource (SR) and composite resource (CR)

(see ﬁgure 2). A document (e.g. a note) can be a

direct example of SR. An agent is also considered as

a SR because the agent can provide knowledge. CR

is composed of other resources (e.g. note cluster may

be composed of other notes or note clusters). The an-

notation is also represented in mc2 as being a SR. The

annotation has a content, a recipient and a type. The

type can be either a comment, an explanation, a ref-

erence or a question. The annotation concerns any

resource and is added by an agent. Our contribution

to the ontology model started by deﬁning the material

resource (MR) concept which is essential to SMEs.

We deﬁned the MR as resources that have physical

existence. The MR is considered to be a SR (see ﬁg-

ure 3).

The MR has can be specialized to the following

concepts:

• ManufacturingResource: Resources that play a

certain role during activities, e.g. Machines can

have a speciﬁc role during activity (saw machines

are used to cut the metal during the manufacturing

activity).

• ConsumedResource: Resources that can be con-

sumed during activities, e.g. raw materials that

can be consumed during activities (metal is a raw

material that is consumed during the manufactur-

ing activity).

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Figure 2: mc2 resource and role ontology.

Figure 3: The material resource.

• BuySellProduct: Products which are bought by

the enterprise to be sold by the SellActivity for

proﬁt purpose.

• ProducedResource: The products produced in the

enterprise itself by the ManufacturingActivity to

be sold by the SellActivity. There are two speciﬁ-

cations of such resources:

1. StandardProduct: All the parameters of the

product are already speciﬁed by the enterprise.

2. SpeciﬁcProduct : The product is manufactured

according to user-speciﬁc parameters.

6.2 Activity Modeling

The Activity concept is also added to mc2 ontology

model as it so important to SMEs (see ﬁgure 4). The

Activity is deﬁned as processes and procedures done

over time. Every activity requires at least one role to

be preformed. In addition, the activity may be com-

posed of sub-activities. The Activity has the follow-

ing data properties:

• Duration: The duration of the activity (year-

month-days-hours-minutes)

Speciﬁcations of Activity can be:

• ManufacturingActivity: The activity of manufac-

turing a product.

• SellActivity: The activity of selling a product.

• BuyActivity: The activity of buying a resource.

The role concept which is present in mc2 de-

scribes the way of participation in an Activity. This

role can be played by an Agent or by a Manufactur-

ingResource (see ﬁgure 5). The relations between ac-

tivities and resources are presented in ﬁgure 6.

6.3 The Scenario of Manufacturing a

Product in “Tour Equipement”

This scenario is based on PLM (Product Lifecycle

Management) principles. The processes of PLM can

be summarized to: Planning, Design, Realizing, Sell

and deliver. The technical manager receives the client

requirements either by mail or by phone. The tech-

nical manager then writes down all these require-

ments to a numeric document (mc2:document) and

shares it either with himself (in his personal shar-

ing space) or with other members of the enterprise

(e.g. the production manager). The document may

be annotated (mc2:Annotation) by the technical man-

ager or any member who has access to it. This an-

notation may be a comment (e.g. the requirements

concern a speciﬁc/standard product.), an explanation

(e.g. explain an ambiguous point in the client de-

scription), a reference (e.g. a reference to a simi-

lar product speciﬁcations) or a question (e.g. what

should I do here?). If it concerns a speciﬁc product

(mc2:SpeciﬁcProduct), the technical manager makes

the product design using a computer aided design

CAD software (e.g. SolidWorks). The technical man-

ager shows the design and the planning to the client. If

the client validates the technical manager proposition,

the requirements are translated to a command and the

manufacturing activity (mc2:ManufacturingActivity)

starts. This activity requires a role (mc2:role) to

be performed (e.g. a worker). It involves a man-

ufacture resource (mc2:ManufacturingResource) like

machines (mc2:Machine). In addition, this activity

consumes raw materials (mc2:RawMaterials) as be-

ing consumed resources (mc2:ConsumedResources).

During this activity, any member can add annotations

that concern the machines signaling that a machine is

broken down, slow or not suitable for a speciﬁc task,

etc. Annotations may concern raw materials (e.g.

their quality, compatibility). Agents (mc2:Agent) as

being resources may also be annotated. Agents an-

notations are not judgments but rather comments de-

noting agent’s experience or competences. When

the manufacturing activity is ﬁnished, the product

is sold to the client by means of the sell activity

(mc2:SellActivity).

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Figure 4: Adding the Activity concept with its sub-

concepts.

Figure 5: The representation of role.

Figure 6: The relations between Activities and resources.

6.4 The Usage of MEMORAe Platform

To take a concrete usage example, let’s suppose that

the technical manager receives a phone call from Mr.

Anderson (a client) demanding 6 collet chucks for

his enterprise to be delivered within 2 months. The

technical manager takes the notes either directly us-

ing MEMORAe platform to share them in a speciﬁc

sharing space, or by using a tablet application (devel-

oped in our laboratory) that allows the users to take

local notes and then send them to MEMORAe plat-

form when needed. When the user of the tablet ap-

plication decides to capitalize his/her local notes and

send them to MEMORAe platform, he/she has to de-

termine: 1- the concept by which the note will be in-

dexed (e.g. the“collet” concept), 2- the sharing space

in which the note will be shared (e.g. his/her private

sharing space). This note is then accessible in the

MEMORAe platform either by the sharing space or

by accessing the “collet” concept and making it as the

focus concept of the semantic map. So the technical

manager can retrieve in the future his/her notes that

concerns a particular concept. MEMORAe organizes

the knowledge in the enterprise. Now all the notes

that were taken during the manufacturing activity are

accessible as being knowledge resources. In addition,

the process of annotating resources (e.g. machines,

agents, raw materials, documents, etc.) to be shared

plays a great role in knowledge exchange and keeps

a trace of all the decisions that were taken facilitat-

ing their retrieval in the future. For example, if the

technical manager in “Tour Equipement” takes paper-

based notes that concerns the client command, he/she

will not be able to easily retrieve these information

specially if there is not a good archive system (which

is the case in most SMEs). So MEMORAe platform

gives us the ability to save and share the notes in order

to keep a trace of what happened in the enterprise.

7 CONCLUSIONS

The organizational learning in SMEs meets many dif-

ﬁculties and needs a special and non-traditional ap-

proach. We proposed an IT platform that facilitates

knowledge sharing and retrieving between individu-

als. In addition, this platform is supported with an an-

notation tool that keeps a trace of all the notes taken

concerning a particular resource in the enterprise. We

also extended our model to meet new requirements of

SMEs (material resources and activities). A test of

the platform is scheduled to be in November 2013 in

“Tour Equipement” enterprise. Further work would

be done by enriching our platform with many tools

and adding extending the model to capture new con-

cepts like cost, quality, authority and skills.

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