Intelligent System and Solutions for Knowledge Management in Virtual Research Teams--Ontology and Expertise Map (Report‪)‬

1. INTRODUCTION 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 a shared terminology and syntax for efficient and effective interoperability. Ontology offers a solution for solving the interoperability problems brought about by semantic obstacles, that is, obstacles related to definitions of business and scientific terms and software classes. Ontology is taxonomy of concepts and their definitions supported by a logical theory. It is often captured in the form of a semantic network--a graph whose nodes are concepts or individual objects and whose arcs represent relationships or associations among the concepts (Huhns & Singh, 1997). Ontologies may differ not only in their content but also in their structure and implementation. Various methodologies exist to guide the theoretical approach taken, and numerous ontology-building tools are available. The problem is that these procedures have not coalesced into popular development styles or protocols, and the tools have not yet matured as in other software practices. However, ontology is typically built in more or less the following manner (Denny, 2002): acquire domain knowledge; organize the ontology; check the work; commit to the ontology.