A special type of collaborative network comprising only organized collaborations while, in general, collaborative networks include both organized and non-organized collaborations. A collaborative network?(Camarinha-Matos & Afsarmanesh, 2005) is constituted of a variety of entities (e.g., organizations and people) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital and goals. These entities collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals, and their interactions are supported by a computer network.
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).