Temporal Entities in the Context of Cross-Cultural Meetings and Negotiations

  • Authors:

  • Anneli Heimbürger

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Jyväskylä, Faculty of Information Technology, Information Technology Research Institute, P.O. Box 35 (Agora), FIN-40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland, anneli.h ...

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XX
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Time is an essential dimension in our knowledge space. Understanding different temporal dimensions and dynamics in cross-cultural meetings and negotiation processes will improve our skills in cross-cultural communication and increase our cultural competence. It also helps us to identify and formalize cross-cultural concepts and related temporal entities and to construct for example cross-cultural XML Schemas. We address three issues in our paper. First, we discuss implications of cross-cultural differences for meetings and negotiations and introduce the concept of a temporal entity in this context. Second, we present three relevant ontological approaches --OWL-Time, temporal aggregates and temporal regions of the Span ontology --for modelling temporal entities in the context of cross-cultural meetings and negotiations. Third, we give proof-of-concept examples of applying those ontological approaches to scheduling meetings and recurrent actions over time zones and to describing temporal parts of cross-cultural meetings and negotiations between Finland and Japan. Cross-cultural XML Schemas and temporal entities have important roles in design and implementation of culture-sensitive information systems.