Also known as a geographically dispersed team (GDT), is a group of individuals who work across time, space, and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by means of communication technology. They have complementary skills and are committed to a common purpose, have interdependent performance goals, and share an approach to work for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Geographically dispersed teams allow organizations to hire and retain the best people regardless of the location. A virtual team does not always mean a team of tele-workers. Tele-workers are defined as individuals who work from home. Many virtual teams in today’s organizations consist of employees either working at home or in the office at different geographic locations.
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).