Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Issues on Virtual Co-operative Environments

Due to the process of internationalisation, markets become more dynamic and force companies to re-organise their structures as virtual co-operative environments. In order to successfully meet new market requirements and to stabilise leadership in competition, a lot of efforts to develop strategies and to set up tools in order to allow knowledge transfer and retrieval have to be made. In this paper, considerations are made on how to spend these efforts properly. Reasons of possible obstacles and synergies in co-operation that emerge from differences in humans’ cultural and professional backgrounds will be pointed out. On the basis of the man-machine interaction via natural language, it will be exemplarily shown, how the use of ontology also contributes to the enhancement of virtual co-operation in these environments