What is Collaborative Design

Collaborative design in dispersed groups of engineers creates various kinds of challenges to technology, organization and social environment. Selected examples are knowledge sharing, coordination support or secure tool integration (Jacucci, Pawlak, & Sandkuhl, 2005). Work presented in this chapter is located in the area of formation of teams for collaborative design. The challenge addressed is how to describe and represent the competences needed for a planned collaborative design project in a way that those individuals best suited for the collaboration can be identified. The proposed approach is to apply ontology engineering to modeling competences of individuals, including different competence areas like cultural competences, professional competences or occupational competences.