Ontology and Expertise Map Building in Virtual Organizations

When organizations collaborate in virtual space, a common frame of reference, or at least a common terminology, is necessary for human-to-human, humanto-machine, and machine-to-machine communication. Similarly, within a core organization characterized by distributed collaboration between remote sites and research or production units, a common understanding of reference terms is indispensable. Yet this common understanding of terms is often implicit at best and frequently not present at all. Misunderstandings between distributed team members and faulty translations of software applications contribute to the rising costs of interoperability in virtual, distributed organizations. Indeed, the growing implementation of distributed software agents necessitates developing and adopting fective interoperability. Ontology offers a solution for solving the interoperability problems brought about by semantic obstacles,