SYNERGY is a research project funded by the European Commission with the aim of developing
What is a Virtual Organisation ?
A Virtual Organisation means a group of individual entities (such as companies or consultants), each with their own autonomy, who work together, mostly temporarily, for a specific purpose (such as a large project) whilst maintaining their separate identities.In practice, this usually presents a number of challenges. Here are just three common problems:
- Finding the most suitable partners to react quickly to a new opportunity, such as a Call for Tender
- Defining and coordinating everyone's roles
- Different processes and systems (especially commercial, design & manufacturing ones) within each company usually make integration non-feasible, but how to make them interoperable?
Knowledge Management in a VO
- How can we find out who knows what?
- What are the knowledge-sharing needs among the partners?
- What knowledge can we share without harming our intellectual property rights?
- What can we learn from previous projects??
- How do we know which people in our network have the contacts we?re looking for?
The SYNERGY project aims to enhance effective knowledge sharing between organisations and to stimulate collaboration by developing a highly intelligent technological system based on collaboration patterns and knowledge flows. The goal is to enhance support of the networked enterprise in the successful and timely creation of, and participation in, collaborative VO?s by providing an infrastructure and services to discover, capture, deliver and apply knowledge relevant to collaboration creation and operation.
Who is working on SYNERGY ?
The SYNERGY team is itself a virtual organisation of eight SMEs, universities and research institutes from six countries throughout Europe:
- Coventry University, UK (Coordinator), led by Prof. Keith Popplewell
- CIM College, Serbia, led by Prof. Vojislav Stoiljkovic
- Douglas Connect, Switzerland, led by Dr Barry Hardy
- EBM Websourcing, France, led by Jean-Pierre Lorré
- Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe, Germany, led by Dr Nenad Stojanovic
- Institute of Computer & Communications Systems, Greece, led by Prof. Gregoris Mentzas
- Loughborough University, UK, led by Dr Jenny Harding and Dr Bob Young
- Technology Application Network, UK, led by Colin Piddington and Gash Bhullar
What will make SYNERGY dynamic and adaptive?
SYNERGY will use semantic ontology-based modelling of knowledge structures about collaborative working to create an automatically self-adaptive architecture. This means it will be able to learn continuously from usage and experience and be able to identify new knowledge sources. The result will be a service-oriented set of web-based services that can foster collaboration between enterprises and support best-practice collaboration patterns.
For more details, please see the Research section.
