1136 Ontology and Expertise Map Building in Virtual Organizations Gila Molcho Technion--Israel Institute of Technology, Israel Anca Draghici Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania Nada Matta University of Technology of Troyes, France IntroductIon When organizations collaborate in virtual space, a common frame of reference, or at least a common terminology, is necessary for human-to-human, human- to-machine, and machine-to-machine communication. Similarly, within a core organization characterized by distributed collaboration between remote sites and research or production units, a common understanding of reference terms is indispensable. Yet this common understanding of terms is often implicit at best and fre- ships among them, and provides formal definitions and axioms that constrain the interpretation of these terms (Gomez-Perez, 1998). Ontologies facilitate a rich variety of structural and nonstructural relationships, such as generalization, inheritance, aggregation, and instantiation. They can supply a precise domain model for software applica- tions and include frameworks for modeling domain knowledge and agreements about representations (Huhns & Singh, 1997). For instance, an ontology can provide the object schema of object-oriented systems