Knowledge Discovery For Moderating Collaborative Projects

Competitive advantage can be gained through targeted exploitation of proprietary knowledge of all types, but especially of expertise and experience. One of the major issues in multidiscipline collaborative projects is how best to share and simultaneously exploit different types of expertise, without duplicating efforts or inadvertently causing conflicts or loss of efficiency through misunderstandings of individual or shared goals. Hence the challenges are enormous when considered in the context of distributed decision making from concept design, through product and manufacturing system design, volume production and on into obsolescence. Moderator technology, in the form of knowledge based software support systems, have been successfully demonstrated in both the product and manufacturing system design domains. However, knowledge acquisition, learning and updating of knowledge is yet to be fully studied. This paper presents a knowledge discovery framework to support knowledge acquisition for moderator technology in collaborative projects.