Collaborative Ontology Building in Virtual Innovation Factories

The knowledge-intensive nature of business innovation paradigms requires advanced method for managing the informative resources in the scope of an enterprise, especially in a virtual enterprise. In this context, a challenging task is to support the participation of workers to elicit/codify their tacit domain knowledge, providing the means to convert it into a more explicit and processable one. To this end in this paper we present a collaborative ontology building methodology, which allows a community of practice, including knowledge engineers, domain experts, and ontology stakeholders to cooperate for: (i) producing conceptual models and reaching a consensus on their suitability with respect to the application domain at hand; (ii) guaranteeing at the same time a sound formal encoding into a computational ontology. The presented approach adopts standard languages, such as SKOS and OWL, and it is supported by a software platform built upon a semantic wiki. First experiences conducted within the BIVEE project are also reported.