Developing an Advanced Environment for Collaborative Computing

May 2000

Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2000)

Volume

Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2000)

All Papers

This paper presents the research directions of a project seeking to augment advanced collaborative web-based environments with knowledge management capture. Knowledge management tries to organize and make available important know-how, whenever and wherever is needed. Today, organizations rely on decision-makers to produce mission critical decisions that are based on inputs from multiple domains. Additionally, learning companies benefit by not repeating costly mistakes, and by reducing time to market in research and development projects. Group decision making tools can help organizations make better decisions by capturing the knowledge from groups of experts. Furthermore, organizations that capture their customer’s preferences can improve their customer service, which translates to larger profits. Therefore, collaborative computing provides a common communication space, improves sharing of knowledge, provides a mechanism for real-time feedback on the tasks being performed, helps to optimize processes, and results in a centralized knowledge warehouse. The project will begin by developing a collaborative computing environment based on Postdoc, a government off the shelf document management software developed at NASA Ames Research Center. Future directions for research are presented as well.