Knowledge collaboration environment for supporting scientific communities: Implications to the construction industry

This research is focussed on providing a flexible and configurable infrastructure for Knowledge Management (KM) aspects of distributed collaboration. The new knowledge created through this research will help to close the scientific community’s research process, and knowledge creation and dissemination gaps. This will assist geographically dispersed research communities with efficient knowledge creation and dissemination procedures and assist in overcoming the risks and inefficiencies of distributed Knowledge Collaboration process. The proposed infrastructure for collaborative KM connects heterogeneous tools, systems, processes and Intellectual Property (IP) repositories together with an integrated toolset to form a novel Knowledge Collaboration and research facilitation environment. This infrastructure provides scientific communities with secure, centralised access to resources for empowering distributed Knowledge Collaboration process with superior visibility and control. Utilisation of the proposed Knowledge Collaboration environment within the construction industry is becoming a reality due to the extent of collaboration among the stakeholders necessitated in the near future. The issues raised have important ramifications for construction, and are discussed in the paper.