An Ontology for Virtual Organization Breeding Environments

Companies and individuals connect into networks to share their resources with the purpose of achieving a common 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 levels. First, there is a common knowledge about the organizational structure itself that can be used and reused in any of such networks. 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 relationships in a specific type of network, namely virtual organization breeding environment (VBE), and second, by proposing a methodology for extracting network-specific knowledge related to competencies. The instantiation of the proposed VBE ontology and the developed approach to semiautomated construction of competencies have been applied to real problem scenarios of Virtuelle Fabrik, a Swiss-German cluster of companies in mechanical engineering.