An Ontology for Virtual Organization Breeding Environments

Abstract—Companies and individuals connect into networks to share their resources with the purpose of achieving a com-mon goal. The field of collaborative network organizations covers various types of organizational structures. Knowledge, which is stored in such networks, can be separated into two different lev-els. First, there is a common knowledge about the organizational structure itself that can be used and reused in any of such net-works. The second level represents the domain-specific knowledge, which such networks cover and use to function. In this paper, we address both levels, first, by proposing an ontology representing the common vocabulary and identifying the actors and relation-ships in a specific type of network, namely virtual organization breeding environment (VBE), and second, by proposing a method-ology for extracting network-specific knowledge related to com-petencies. The instantiation of the proposed VBE ontology and the developed approach to semiautomated construction of compe-tencies have been applied to real problem scenarios of Virtuelle Fabrik, a Swiss–German cluster of companies in mechanical engineering. Index Terms—Collaborative network organization, ontology, ontology construction, virtual organization. I