Ontological Collaboration Engineering

Abstract

This chapter gives a comprehensive overview of ongoing research about semantic approaches for Collaboration Engineering. The authors present a new ontology-based approach, where each concept of the ontology corresponds to a specific collaboration step or a resource, to collect, manage, and share collaborative knowledge. The chapter discusses the utility of the proposed ontology in the context of a real-world example where the authors explain how collaboration can be modelled and applied using their ontology in order to improve the collaboration process. Furthermore, they discuss how well-known ontologies, such as FOAF, can be linked to their ontology and extend it. While the focus of the chapter is on semantic Collaboration Engineering, the authors additionally present methods of reasoning and machine learning to derive new knowledge about the collaboration process as a further research direction.