Ontologies for Collaborative Networked Organizations

problem solving philosophy, it is necessary to introduce a mechanism to share common understanding of the information and to agree on a controlled vocabulary used for communication. An ontology provides a representation of knowledge, which can be used and re-used, in order to facilitate the comprehension of concepts and relationships in a given domain, and the communication between different domain actors, by making the domain assumptions explicit. These actors can be either software agents or people that need to access or share a piece of information (Gruber, 1993). A collaborative network is an association of a set zations, individuals, etc.) and may include organized and non-organized collaborations. In this chapter we focus on collaborative networked organizations (CNOs) which represents only organized and intentional collaborations. CNOs can be roughly characterized as long-term or short-term associations. A long-term association of organizations is called a virtual organization breeding environment (VBE) and its main purpose is to enable fast creation of virtual organiza-