Engineering Process Ontologies for Communication, Co-operation, and Co- ordination in a Virtual Enterprise

To work together, members of a virtual organisation must be able to establish cooperation, exchange information with each other, and co-ordinate shared activities across open interfaces with strong support from information and communications technologies. This paper promotes the concept of a process ontology as a groundwork for communication, co-operation, and co-ordination for virtual enterprises and teams. We discuss the background of our work and related activities in ontology development, give a scenario of a future mode of operation for a virtual enterprise, and describe our work in progress aimed at visualising and prototyping shared engineering ontologies and using them as a basis of agent-based process coordination across the Internet.