Semantic interoperability in tools for intercultural collaboration

In software/content development in intercultural environments, collaboration among participants and effective administration are crucial for overall successful projects. Various tools are used to achieve the collaboration and the administration of the project: no single groupware is sufficient for both collaboration support and management. Therefore, interoperability among various tools employed in one project is essential for efficient collaboration. To establish semantic interoperability of collaboration tools, we have designed an RDF tag set that can function as vocabulary to describe information interoperably among the tools. In this paper, we propose a tag set to describe information in intercultural projects and show how the data in collaboration tools and project management tools are integrated with those semantic tags. With the tag set and the supporting method, it is expected that the members and the administrators do not have to pay much efforts to keep the collaboration status.