Forms of Collaboration in Collaborative Enterprises: An Ontological Model

Reasoning techniques and their relations to cognition and reality gained significant momentum fueled by the advent of complex information systems which rely on robust and coherent, formal representations of their subject matter. In this sense, ontologies can provide models of different aspects of a business entity contributing to intra- and inter-enterprise information systems. This is particularly relevant for collaborative enterprises, which are entities far more complex than single enterprises. In particular, for the governance of collaborative enterprises it is essential to determine the relevant KPIs for the type of collaborative enterprise, taking into account several characteristics such as lifecycle and size. The main objective of this work is to develop an ontology of collaborative enterprises which enables the semi-automatic classification of instances. To this aim, we take into account the type of collaborative enterprise, its maturity (i.e., the lifecycle phase), size, territorial extension and other characteristics.