An Ontology for ActionCenter-Oriented Collaboration Platforms

There is a growing number of collaboration technology platforms that support rapid development and deployment of Action Center applications -- collaborative applications that encapsulate both collaboration expertise and tools for effective collaborative work practices using the facilitator-in-a-box strategy. This strategy enables instantiation and diffusion of state-of-the-art collaboration patterns for high-value recurring tasks. A side effect of the growing number of platforms is the potential for incompatibilities among Action Centers that can reduce interoperability, knowledge sharing and reuse. We present an ontology for Action Center-oriented collaboration platforms that formalizes key concepts of the approach using OWL. The resulting ontology can reduce ambiguities and promote knowledge sharing, reuse and standardization.