Systematic analysis of information management challenges within long-term collaborative networks

Abstract

Long-term strategic networks - the so called Virtual organizations Breeding Environments (VBEs) - support their members with formation of virtual organizations (VOs), aimed to address opportunities in market/society. But, both establishment and management of these networks are challenging. On one hand, VBE aims at guiding its member organizations to accumulate/share their abilities and resources and work together as one strong virtual company. On the other hand, attempts to aggregate their competencies and resources to both identify what they can jointly achieve and to represent them as a single strong entity in the market/society. These in turn require support for strong interaction and interoperability among VBE members, as well as preserving interdependencies among their variety of information. This paper systematically analyses the base requirements and describes foundational criteria for modeling and management of information in VBEs. Particularly, it justifies the need for development of a generic unified VBE ontology-based system, in response to the identified VBE information management challenges. Finally, it specifies the main research problem areas and questions. Forthcoming publications will focus on the next steps of this research and how the raised research questions are addressed by our designed mechanisms and developed systems. © 2012 International Federation for Information Processing.