An ontology based approach for development and operation of Virtual organization Breeding Environments

A Virtual organization Breeding Environment (VBE) is a new paradigm formed as a long-term strategic alliance of organizations that get together in order to increase their chances for involvement in goal-oriented consortiums such as Virtual Organizations (VOs). Development of software systems supporting VBE management and particularly the design and development of a generic VBE Management System (VMS) are challenging. The VBE is a complex environment that represents a wide variety of distributed but inter-related actors such as VBE members, VBE administration, and various VBE support institutions, resources such as VBE members' profile catalogues, VBE measured performances, and VBE Bag of Assets' elements that represent shared documents, software and lessons learned, regulations such as VBE ethical code, VBE polices, and VBE value systems, and functionalities such as competency management, trust establishment, members rewarding, etc. among others. Thus, systematic approaches are required to develop the VMS and to integrate its subsystems. This paper addresses the problem area for the development and operation of the VMS and suggests the engineering of VBE ontology to support it. The paper further presents the ODMS, the Ontology Discovery and Management System, as a fundamental component of the VMS, providing support functionalities mainly towards VBE's knowledge modeling and management. Systematic approaches for engineering of the VBE ontology and for development of the ODMS system are discussed in details