The management of ontologies in the VO Breeding Environments domain

The elements and aspects endogenous to Virtual Organisations Breeding Environments (VBEs) constitute a wide variety of entities, concepts and functionalities that are interrelated and together represent the structural, component, functional and behavioural perspectives of these environments. Nevertheless, VBE elements and aspects need to be modelled in a unified manner and their specification made accessible to both its human actors and its software subsystems that are involved either in supporting the management of the VBE itself or its daily operation, e.g., the creation of Virtual Organisations (VOs). This paper addresses the problem areas of the engineering and management of the VBE domain ontology as supported by the Ontology Discovery and Management System (ODMS), addresses the approaches for specification, construction, decomposition, adaptation/customisation and manipulation of the VBE ontology and introduces an extensive list of generic VBE elements by providing their textual descriptions. Furthermore, due to the complexity of endogenous VBE elements, the ODMS introduces the partitioning of the VBE ontology into a set of sub-ontologies. In addition to knowledge interoperability and reuse, the ODMS also supports the semi-automated discovery/analysis of new ontology elements from online text corpora, assisted by human experts within the VBE.