A meta-ontology for knowledge acquisition and exploitation of collaborative social systems

Designing and/or managing collaborative social systems are obviously a complicated task, mainly due to the heterogeneity of the partners involved in terms of objectives, resources, information systems and so on. Whatever approach is adopted to support the collaboration (Mediation Information System, Peer-to-peer, Centralized Information System, etc.), one unavoidable issue is Knowledge Management. Gathering, formalizing and exploiting all the knowledge and information concerning a given collaborative situation is a critical requirement. In such a context, information and knowledge are widely distributed and the resources are classically not efficiently organized and utilized. A conceptualization is thus required to make the knowledge of the relations among the stakeholders explicit. This research work aims to provide a shared and common understanding of the management of collaboration, in order to be able to design and monitor future Decision-Making Support Tools and/or Collaborative Information Systems. Practically, the research works develops a generic meta-model and its ontology able to characterize a collaborative context and associated behaviors. All this knowledge is summarized through a Collaboration Meta-Ontology (CMO). Being in a formal format, the CMO provides partners with the means for acquiring, sharing and reasoning about collaborative information and knowledge. An illustration on the case of collaborative emergency management systems is developed.