A shorter version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the ED-MEDIA World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications, Denver, CO, June 2002.

Abstract: This paper describes a proposed system for competency-based just-in-time learning that uses competency ontologies and semantic web services to deliver learning objects to learners in a corporate environment. A competency ontology is a rich, semantic description of the competencies an employee must possess in order to participate in specific activities of the business processes of a company. Semantic web services are web services based on SOAP, WSDL and UDDI that have been further augmented with semantic descriptions. These semantic descriptions enable people and software agents to more efficiently identify services that can provide the proper learning objects. The key to the just-in-time delivery of learning objects is an explicit representation of the business processes of the enterprise and learning processes personalized to each employee.