The Production and Innovation Knowledge Repository

A virtual enterprise is a networked organization where different autonomous entities collaborate toward a common goal. The BIVEE project introduces the notion of virtual innovation factory (VIF) as an innovation oriented virtual enterprise whose goal is to support the production of innovation. The latter takes place in the business innovation space, where active entities, beyond the research and development (R&D) innovation teams, final users, partners or even competing companies and other actors, are operating outside the enterprise boundaries. Operational processes pertaining to the BIS define the core innovation value chain: sourcing raw ideas, transforming them into products (goods and services), and marketing and delivering new products. Finally, processes for the planning and monitoring of innovation projects conducted in the BIS characterize the managerial level of a VIF. All these kinds of activities require intensive collaboration, communication and interaction, and ultimately a high level of knowledge sharing among the involved autonomous actors. Indeed, knowledge is the main factor that enables continuous innovation in a world of rapidly changing markets, products, services and technologies. Efficient access to knowledge resources is, however, hindered by interoperability issues coming from fragmentation and heterogeneity of the involved players, their data, information and knowledge resources. In order to address interoperability issues and enable sharing of knowledge, the BIVEE project proposes an approach based on semantic technologies. In particular, this chapter presents the design principles and the prototype definition of the production and innovation knowledge repository (PIKR), a semantics-based repository for knowledge resources related to the BIS where the VIF operates. The PIKR is a virtual repository since actual resources (e.g. enterprise documents) physically reside locally, at the premises of the individual VE partners, while the PIKR maintains and manages an ontology-based image of such resources, as the result of their semantic description. Leveraging on the semantic description of enterprise resources, the PIKR provides a set of services for supporting smart access to stored resources, facilitating the sharing of contents and supporting the information and knowledge interoperability with the ultimate goal of supporting innovation project management. The design principles of the PIKR descend from the analysis of user requirements and the methodological framework elaborated within the BIVEE project. The analysis led to the recognition of core elements to be semantically described, namely documents, business processes (BPs) and key performance indicators (KPIs), and the relations among them.