A method for the collaborative development of shared domain conceptualizations in inter-organizational contexts

Abstract

The early phases of setting up information and knowledge management architectures for inter-organizational teams are complex and problematic mainly due to the actor's heterogeneous professional and cultural backgrounds. The big challenge stands on the proper definition, in short-term, of the concepts and relations, which are the basis of the information and knowledge architecture to be common to the collaborative network. Like this, considering a common conceptualization of a given reality as the cornerstone for information and knowledge sharing among a network of social actors, the core problem is how to create suitable socio-technical tools to support the collaborative process of creating semantic artifacts to be operationalized in some short-term business opportunity. Sharing information and knowledge implies sharing a set of conceptual structures between network partners. They need to negotiate a common vocabulary, meaning of concepts and their relations, to develop the information organization system. The problems raised by information and knowledge sharing in the context of collaborative networks have been researched in the last decade in the so-called Ontology Engineering community. After a deep analysis of the state-of-the-art in this area one can conclude that the current underpinnings of ontology engineering are not enough for the future challenges of building semantic artifacts, i.e., do not give an appropriate answer to the new challenges raised by the every time