Task-Centred Knowledge Sharing in e-Collaboration

The Knowledge Grid is an effective large-scale market that offers on-demand services to support e-Collaboration by providing a platform that enables people, processes and computers to work collaboratively, and manage and share knowledge resources. However, the problem of locating and matching appropriate knowledge resources from across organisational boundaries to various tasks within specific e-Work projects remains a huge challenge. This often stems from lack of collective trust among virtual teams and the high value which organisations attach to knowledge as an asset of competitive advantage. In this paper, we present an approach for task-centred knowledge sharing in e-Collaboration. Our approach uses task-aware knowledge element models for locating and matching knowledge resources for specific e-Work tasks, and a work context tree for contextually determining the semantics of knowledge resources at different levels. We illustrate the approach using e-Workbench - a prototype adaptive collaborative e-Work support system based on the Knowledge Grid.