An association (also known as cluster) or pool of organizations and their related supporting institutions that have both the potential and the will to cooperate with each other through the establishment of a “base” long-term cooperation agreement and interoperable infrastructure (Camarinha-Matos & Afsarmanesh, 2005). A VBE responds to business opportunities by forming VOs. As an organization, it has also competencies but not limited to the union of the competencies of its participants. The VBE competencies are the result of combining two or more participants’ competencies to realize more complex projects.
Published in Chapter:
Ontologies for Collaborative Networked Organizations
Joël Plisson (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia), Peter Ljubic (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia), Igor Mozetic (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia), and Nada Lavrac (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia, and University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 8
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-885-7.ch148
Abstract
It is commonly agreed that networking, as a new way of collaboration, brings benefit to its members (Camarinha- Matos & Afsarmanesh, 2005). Collaboration implies communication and sharing of knowledge between network participants. However, as the participants may be from different fields or may follow a different problem solving philosophy, it is necessary to introduce a mechanism to share common understanding of the information and to agree on a controlled vocabulary used for communication. An ontology provides a representation of knowledge, which can be used and re-used, in order to facilitate the comprehension of concepts and relationships in a given domain, and the communication between different domain actors, by making the domain assumptions explicit. These actors can be either software agents or people that need to access or share a piece of information (Gruber, 1993).