A unified ontology for VO Breeding Environments

Both profit and non-profit organizations are nowadays increasingly eager to join their efforts and share their resources and knowledge, forming a Virtual Organization (VO) in order to increase their chances when responding to market/society opportunities. As such, the formation of "strategic alliances" such as the Virtual organization Breeding Environments (VBEs) has emerged as promising form of networks of organizations in the modern market and society to enhance the preparedness of its members for participation in potential VOs. The success of cooperation among organizations within the VBEs however primarily depends on the proper modeling and intelligent management of the networks’ knowledge. KMM (Knowledge Modeling and Management) in VBEs is however challenging. The dispersity, dynamism and scalability of the VBE networks, as well as domain/business area specialization and heterogeneity of their knowledge represent obstacles for their KMM development. For example, in large networks (with even more than 20 organizations), reaching a common conceptual understanding of the business area/domain terminology is problematic among members. Similarly, providing complete and correct classification of organizations’ competencies is challenging due to their semantic and syntactic heterogeneity. In this research, we follow a systematic approach to design and engineer a reusable comprehensive "unified" ontology for VBEs in order to support VBEs’ KMM. The main objective of this paper is however to detail the unified VBE ontology.