Building adaptive systems for collaborative e-work: The e-Workbench approach

Abstract

The widely recognised transition to e-work brought by recent advances in Web Intelligence, the Grid, virtual social networks and the knowledge economy has considerably changed our working pattern, and created new challenges for collaborative work support systems. In this paper, e-Workbench – a novel framework for building adaptive systems for collaborative e-work is proposed. e-Workbench is based on the Knowledge Grid, and provides support for task-centred knowledge construction by generating knowledge element models for adaptively locating and retrieving knowledge services within the Knowledge Grid environment. The Knowledge Grid offers a uniform platform for large-scale human-machine collaboration and effective knowledge sharing and management across the Internet from which on-demand knowledge for supporting collaborative e-work could be harnessed. The potentials of e-Workbench in exploiting the Knowledge Grid in order to provide adaptive support to problem-solving and decision-making in collaborative e-work are described. The approach integrates a number of intelligent systems techniques for acquiring knowledge about work, and uses an ontology-based metadata model for knowledge representation and a semantic link network structure for e-workflow modelling.