Collaborative networked organizations, either as a collaboration among
organizations such as virtual enterprises / virtual organizations, or
collaboration among people such as professional virtual organizations,
or even a mixed combination such as in e-Science, represent a very
dynamic research and development area.
Collaborative networked organizations - for which a growing number of
case studies can be found nowadays in different sectors of industry,
services, and even governmental organizations - provide a basis for
cooperation, competitiveness, world-excellence, and agility in turbulent
market and environment conditions. In the case of companies,
collaborative networks can support them to identify and exploit new
business potential, boost innovation, and increase their knowledge.
Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations contains
selected articles from PRO-VE'03, the Fourth Working Conference on
Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation
for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Lugano, Switzerland in
October 2003. This fourth edition includes a rich set of papers
revealing the progress and achievements in the main current focus areas:
-VO breeding environments;
-Formation of collaborative networked organizations;
-Ontologies and knowledge management;
-Process models and interoperability;
-Infrastructures;
-Multi-agent approaches.
In spite of many valid contributions in these areas, many research
challenges remain. This is clearly stated in a number of papers
suggesting a new research agenda and strategic research roadmaps for
advanced virtual organizations.
With the selected papers included in this book, PRO-VE pursues its
double mission as a forum for presentation and discussion of
achievements as well as a place to discuss and suggest new directions
and research strategies.
