A BUSINESS ONTOLOGY FOR SUPPORTING CROSS BORDER COOPERATION BETWEEN EUROPEAN CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE

The recent EU enlargement opens up new opportunities, but poses new issues to be addressed. In particular, in order to enable and support cooperation between firms from different countries, it is necessary to address interoperability issues. The LD-CAST project aims at enabling cross border cooperation between European chambers of commerce (CCs) for supporting the development of private company initiatives. The project objective is to build a European network of portals that will enable end users (mainly private companies) to access in a seamless mode services provided by public organizations registered in each portal. This paper briefly presents a cooperation framework for semantic interoperability mainly based on the following semantic technologies: ontology management, semantic annotation, and semantic search and discovery. Finally the business ontology produced in the course of the project is presented.