Knowledge sharing in collaborative research activities

Abstract

Collaboration is the process of creating new knowledge that involves communication through a shared artifact for the sake of creating a new understanding that the participants could not have achieved on their own. There are many collaborative tools designed to help researchers working within groups, but does not support the motivation to use it, and also the integration between collaborative tools is missing which leads to an information silos problem resulting in scattering of information and knowledge. A questionnaire was constructed to identifying essential problems that impede the course of the collaborative process and finding solutions to solve the problems that can contribute to raise the level of teamwork. For that a Knowledge Sharing (KS) in Collaborative Research Activities framework is designed to solve the problems and to visualize an integration of the collaborative tools by configuring correlation between the research information based on the workflow management technology. The framework aims to motivate researchers to exchange their research information especially knowledge where the KS process supports the development of a research information repository. This paper shows how a combination of the three pillars of collaboration, Ellis framework and the KS framework contributes to design the proposed framework.