This paper presents a policy-based coordination model for team collaboration. Team collaboration requires an agreement that utilizes a negotiation protocol to find candidate teams and to decide on a collaboration partner. The decision relies on policies that are rules governing team situations in an organization. Contexts and rules allow reasoning about team situations. The authors describe a policy-based negotiation protocol. It introduces an ontology-based whiteboard component that uses the Semantic Web technologies such as Web Ontology Language (OWL), Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), and Semantic Query-enhanced Web Rule Language (SQWRL). The negotiation protocol facilitates whiteboards as a computational foundation for awareness of situations and policies, and it assists with the final decision using a measure based on the combination of rule-based queries and functions.
