Towards Semantic Interoperability in Virtual Organisations

Virtual organisations (VOs) are amongst the most advanced forms of doing business to date. Their emergence and growing capacities are closely related to the networking and collaboration capabilities provided by a supporting ICT infrastructure. However, whilst considerable progress in the development of such infrastructures has been achieved over the years, interoperability still remains a major challenge. In this paper we analyse the nature of the semantic interoperability problem, review the state of the art, and derive a set of requirements. On that basis, we propose a novel semantic interoperability framework for VOs, utilising current semantic Web technologies, and suggest possible design and implementation methods for its achievement. Reported is in-house work of the authors as well as on-going research in the frames of the EU project InteliGrid (IST-2004-004664).