Ontology Based Skill Matchmaking Between Contributors and Projects in Open Source Hardware

Open source hardware (OSH) projects are dynamic with respect to those actively participating in them. In addition, often-stated challenges in OSH projects are the difficulty to find suitable collaborators and to motivate them to stay for the longer run. This paper addresses these challenges to balance the workload between the project core team and the community. For this purpose, an ontology-based demonstrator for skill-based matching in OSH communities was developed and evaluated. A sample project and user data from a collaborative online OSH development platform was enriched with skills and connected with a semantic network consisting of two ontologies. On one hand, the demonstrator enables finding users with particular capabilities to match certain project requirements. On the other hand, users of the development platform can be matched to projects based on their skill interests. A use case scenario was evaluated using the demonstrator. The results show that an integration of a semantic network with a collaborative OSH development platform is realisable and presents potentials for further utilization.