Ontology building and maintenance in collaborative virtual environments

The role of ontologies in the enterprise world is constantly increasing, and they are proving even more necessary in distributed production realities, like in extended logistics, industrial districts, or virtual enterprises. In such realities, a common conceptual basis is necessary to compensate the fragmentation inherent in the underlying industrial models. This paper presents an end-to-end framework based on an open, collaborative approach for developing and maintaining business domain ontologies. The framework has been achieved within the European Project BIVEE and has been experimented in two industrial realities: the high-tech sector of robotics and the more traditional one of furniture. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.