Knowledge Interoperability Services

The aim of the Knowledge Interoperability work is to develop specific semantic services aimed at integrating the management of the capabilities of the partners operating and co-operating in a Collaborative Network. The idea is that the capabilities of the CN, and of any specific aggregation of enterprises therein (e.g., a Virtual Organization created to respond to a particular Business Opportunity), emerge from the capabilities of each individual partner. It is well known that competencies management is a challenging activity at enterprise level. Therefore, if we want to address the same problem at an enterprise cluster level the undertaking requires new, advanced solutions. It is our opinion that this challenging objective can be achieved by means of an extensive use of semantic technologies.

To this end, two classes of services are subject to research.
Base Semantic Services (BSS)
BSS are semantics-driven basic services for acquiring, gathering and organizing knowledge of single enterprises and the CN as whole. The BSS are

• Massive Ontology Building/Enrichement: for building/enrich a CN reference ontology describing the target competences and skills (CS) asset of the CN (CSOnto). Once the CSOnto is built, it will be used to describe the knowledge asset of the single CN members.

• Enterprise Semantic Profiling: once the CSOnto is built, it will be used to describe the knowledge asset of the single CN members. In this way, all the enterprises within a certain CN will be described in terms of the same common and shared reference (i.e., the CSOnto). At this stage, each enterprise, and the CN as well, will be represented by a Semantic Enterprise Profile (ESP), structured as an ontology-based feature vector (OFV).

• Enterprise Semantic Matchmaking: ESP will be then used as input for a semantic matchmaking service, which will be the base mechanism for contrasting knowledge assets of enterprises.

Knowledge Interoperability Services (KIS)
Knowledge Interoperability services, providing advanced business services. These advanced services are ontology based and are funded on the BSS. The KIS are:

• Semantic support to the entrance of a new partner in the CN, to evaluate the entrance of a new enterprise in the CN, by contrasting the knowledge asset of the new potential partner and the CN needs;

• Semantic support to enterprise knowledge alignment, to assess new CN needs and identify gaps between available CS and CN needs;

• Semantic support to knowledge transfer from the VO to the CN, to transfer to the CN new CS emerging from a Virtual Organization (VO) experience.