Information Enrichment for Decision Support in Virtual Collaboration

In collocated organisation-based work settings, knowledge workers often approach problem solving by combining explicit domain information with their practice-based knowledge in ways that are largely driven by their specific work context. In virtual collaborative work, such common grounds for decision making offered by a shared work context hardly exist. Designing context-aware systems to support decision making in virtual collaboration, thus, poses a huge challenge because of the inherent difficulty in establishing a shared context of work and users adequate for supporting cohesive collaboration and knowledge sharing among individuals across boundaries. To address this problem, this paper proposes a framework, which incorporates an explicit model of context between the domain model of an application and the activity landscapes of various individuals, workgroups and organisations collaborating across borders, and between these landscapes and the knowledge resource space model in an intelligent ubiquitous environment. We suggest that as a result of the high level of knowledge required in collaborative e-work as well as its changing work contexts, e-work support systems need to provide not only information in the form of documents and articles, but also expert-level explanations in the form of supporting literature and references to theories and related cases, to justify retrieved information and offer cognitive support to e-work.