CONCEPTUAL MAPS BASED SYSTEM TO CAPTURE KNOWLEDGE IN DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIVE R&D PROJECTS

Nowadays, worldwide economy and competition often lead companies to setup temporary alliances with other companies in order to respond to business opportunities. They often join their strength by gathering their research and development (R&D) services into a virtual enterprise (VE) in order to develop engineering design projects in a more efficient way. The work presented in this paper has been developed in the context of the European network of excellence Virtual Research Lab for a Knowledge Community in Production (VRL-KCiP). This network gathers 24 teams of expert researchers in the mechanical production field over 15 European countries. The works, which are carried out in the VRL-KCiP and in a VE are similar: engineering projects are lead in a collaborative and distributed way. The assignments of such virtual organizations (VO) are quite the same and consist mainly in producing collectively new knowledge in order to solve problems. Thus, managing knowledge is of major importance in such a context, due to the high value of knowledge today. In this paper, a system for conceptual knowledge management in virtual organizations is drafted and positioned towards an existing system named n-dim