Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Knowledge is an important resource for organisations, and being able to manage it is a key factor for success. New information management and knowledge sharing approaches should be able to cope not only with possible variations in business situations and contexts, but also with various and sometimes discordant viewpoints, which are inherent to collaborative environments. Developing, reusing and maintaining common interpretations of available information is crucial to support real-word organisational activities. The particularly challenging problem of knowledge elicitation is tackled here combining terminological and knowledge representation views. A corpus-based conceptual modelling architecture was designed and discussed together with the workflows for real-time context retrieval and lexical pattern discovery. The practical implementation and validation of this work are accomplished on the ConceptME system, a platform developed as part of this research line, providing knowledge and terminological tools and resources to support activities that involve collaborative conceptualisation processes according to the ColBlend method.

Abstract
Due to its promising effects on the economic development, innovation networks have been recognized as an important instrument for the industrialization of regions and nations. Therefore, the creation of innovation networks has been fostered by national and regional innovation systems, as several EU nations are launching clustering and networking incentive programs. For example, the German Government initiated in 2002 an incentive program to foster the creation of innovation networks between SMEs, large enterprises, and research institutes. This research aims at identifying different strategies used in practice for the intentional creation of innovation networks by means of a multi-case study on a German enterprise that adhered to the German Government incentive in order to create nine networks during the past three years. Through this exploratory study, we were able to identify three distinctive strategies used by the network managers for the intentional creation of innovation networks: Cooperation Project, Partner Alignment, and Activity Alignment.

Abstract
This paper describes an action-research approach to the specification of an ontology to be applied in the information organisation of a community of forest planning experts. Like many others, a community of forest planning experts does not see their technical domains in unison, rather it voices several points of view that need to be shared and understood. This research started by addressing the practical problem of achieving an effective information structure and organisation for a semantic wiki platform. This was supported by a method and platform for the collaborative specification of ontologies: conceptME. Simultaneously, an empirical study was carried out aiming at understanding better how a technical community pragmatically develops conceptual representations of a domain. The results of this research show the benefits of collaboration in the development of conceptual models for knowledge organisation and information retrieval.

Abstract
The development of new products or processes involves the creation, re-creation and integration of conceptual models from the related scientific and technical domains. Particularly, in the context of collaborative networks of organisations (CNO) (e.g. a multi-partner, international project) such developments can be seriously hindered by conceptual misunderstandings and misalignments, resulting from participants with different backgrounds or organisational cultures, for example. The research described in this article addresses this problem by proposing a method and the tools to support the collaborative development of shared conceptualisations in the context of a collaborative network of organisations. The theoretical model is based on a socio-semantic perspective, while the method is inspired by the conceptual integration theory from the cognitive semantics field. The modelling environment is built upon a semantic wiki platform. The majority of the article is devoted to developing an informal ontology in the context of a European R&D project, studied using action research. The case study results validated the logical structure of the method and showed the utility of the method.