A Model Of Virtual Enterprise Information Organization Based On Topic Map

With the arrival of information age and the increasing maturity of network technology, vitural enterprises come into being and develop gradually. Vitual enterprise is a new kind of enterprise management mode which unites relevant enterprises, making each of them have complementary advantages through their resource-sharing in order to achieve the goal of winning together. To realize the good cooperation among the sub-enterprises, information interchange and knowledge sharing are indispensible, and the information organization is the guarantee of the cooperation.The organizational form of virtual enterprises is different from that of traditional enterprises. Virtual enterprise is not entity enterprise, rather it's a kind of dynamic alliance of enterprises with independent legal person. These enterprises come together for a common goal, it dismisses when the goal is finished. When a new market opportunity arrives, these enterprises will set up a new virtual enterprise according to the characteristics of the opportunity. The special organizational form of virtual enterprises determines the particularity of their information organization. First of all, each sub-enterprise of virtual enterprises has its own information system and their database type may not be the same. Thus, the information organization of virtual enterprises needs to solve the mutual operation among different databases and information systems. Secondly, since virtual enterprise is set up according to certain market opportunity, its members are certainly closely related. Information interchange and knowledge sharing among them must pay attention to relation of message as well. Third, virtual enterprise is an enterprise organization form of great flexibility. It needs to make the quick response to the change of the market information. This requires that it has the capacity of handling information quickly. Finally, because the members of virtual enterprise positions are distributed irregularly and their information resources are relatively dispersed, the information organizations of virtual enterprises need to make sure to do good localization and navigation in information resources.Taking the above-mentioned situations into consideration, we hold that the topic map technology is a kind of technology of information organization which accords with the demand of information organization of virtual enterprises. The topic map technology dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. The topic map technology describes the organization of information in terms of theme, relation, source, carrying on the organization of information by way of classifying them according to their themes and resources, achieving the goal of information management of different information, that is, information navigation.This paper tries to solve the information organization problem of virtual enterprises with topic map technology. The article explains and proves the relevant concepts and operation ways of virtual enterprises at first. After analyzing characteristics of virtual enterprises, we analyzed the difference between organization form of virtual enterprises and that of traditional entity enterprises in order to get a clearer understanding of the characteristics of the information organization of virtual enterprises. Taking these characteristics into account and making comparison between different information organization technologies, we get the conclusion that topic map technology is the best one for information organization of virtual enterprises. Then we explained the principle of topic map. We built a model of information organization of virtual enterprises based on topic map. We also made an evaluation of the model. Finally, we proved with practical examples that the model of information organization of virtual enterprises based on topic map can provide safeguard for the effective communication of virtual enterprise information.