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Engineering Faculty, University of Porto
Doctoral Programme in Informatics Engineering
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Dora Maria de Oliveira Simões Ribeiro Pereira

Contact: dsimoes@fe.up.pt

Admission Date: March, 2004
Status: Concluded, Feb 2008 (pdf available in portuguese)

Advisor: Prof. António Lucas Soares (DEEC/FEUP)

Ontology Engineering for Colaborative Networks of SMEs

The active participation of organizations in collaborative networks is nowadays a critical factor of competitiveness. This is particularly true for SMEs where cooperative strategies are more and more fundamental for their survival. These strategies are catalysed by the availability of emergent technologies such as the so-called Web 2.0. Forming agile collaborative networks will be able to share resources (technological and human), knowledge, to have more easy access to relevant information and thus to expand the scope of its operations inside of the emergent virtual markets, at the same time that they can to answer in efficient and postponed form to the business opportunities. The process of formation of SMEs networks will tend then to be, in a next future, each more frequent and fast.

Supported in idea of Porter (2004) of that networks of relationships inter-enterprises that are mediated by internet technologies can be conceptualized as virtual communities, it is idealized a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE), essentially characterized by a network of SME of a particular area of business. Based in the conceptualization of this VBE formed in a mutual trust base between its members and created with goal of long term, it is intended to define a method that allows supporting in agile form all the knowledge management process involved in life cycle of Virtual Enterprises (VE), with prominence for the phases of formation and dissolution. The technology of ontologies is appealed to it as main instrument of knowledge management, particularly, supporting the composition of ontologies in moment of formation of each VE, and the consequent decomposition of these ontologies in some small segments, when the VEs are dissolved. With the systematization of this process, it is intended to contribute simultaneously for the cyclical, dynamic and agile enrichment of an ontology library system of VBE and for the capabilities generated in each VE constituted.

In sum, the research issues of this PhD work are centered in three main areas:
  • Formation and dissolution of organizational networks (conceptualization of virtual knowledge communities in "breeding environments");
  • Information and knowledge management between organizational networks;
  • Ontology engineering.

Publications

Soares, António L., Simões, Dora; Silva, Manuel; Madureira, Ricardo, 2006 - Developing enterprise sponsored virtual communities: the case of a SME's knowledge community support system, International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF'06). R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM Workshops 2006, LNCS 4277, pp. 269 - 278, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. 2-3 November, Montpellier, France.

Simões, Dora; Soares, António L., 2006 - The socio-technical design of a SME knowledge community in the construction industry, 7th IFIP Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE'06). 23-27 September, Helsinki, Finland.

Silva, Manuel; Soares, António L.; Simões, Dora, 2006 - Integrating Semantic Resources to Support SME Knowledge Communities, 12th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM-2006). 17 - 19 May, Saint-Etienne, France.

Soares, António L.; Silva, Manuel; Simões, Dora, 2006 - Selecting and structuring semantic resources to support SMEs knowledge communities, 8th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-06). 23 - 27 May, Paphos, Cyprus.

Silva, Manuel; Soares, António L.; Simões, Dora; Costa, Rute, 2005 - KNOW-CONSTRUCT: Knowledge based community management in the Construction Industry, Workshop Working with Terminology and Knowledge Management Systems at 7th International Conference on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering (TKE-05). 16 - 19 August, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Simões, Dora, Soares, António L., 2004 - The Formation and Dissolution of Organizational Networks: A Knowledge Management Perspective, 5th IFIP Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PRO-VE'04). 23-26 August, Toulouse, France.

Simões, Dora, Soares, António L., 2004 - Gestão do Conhecimento na Formação e Dissolução de Redes Inter-Organizacionais: Revisão e Requisitos de Alto-Nível, 5ª Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação. 3 a 5 de Novembro, Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa, Lisboa.

Simões, Dora, Soares, António L., 2003 - Redes Organizacionais e Desenvolvimento de Sistemas de Informação, 4ª Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação. 15 a 17 de Outubro, Universidade Portucalense, Porto.

Simões, Dora, Soares, António L., 2002 - Utilização da SSM em Ambientes Organizacionais de Engenharia, 3ª Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação. Departamento de Engenharia Informática. 23 a 25 de Novembro, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra.
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