Managing multiple ontologies in a virtual breeding environment context

This paper proposes a new method to manage the use of ontologies in the context of Virtual Organisations Breeding Environments (VBEs). The research focuses on the dissolution phase of a Virtual Enterprise (VE), where ontology decomposition techniques are used to enrich the ontology library. First, an overview of the process used and the Ontology Library System (OLS) adopted are described. Then, the ontologies' ranking and classification method are described, explaining a set of metrics inspired by social network approaches. Finally, the composition method used to construct a global ontology and the decomposition algorithm implemented to segment an ontology are presented.