Learning Collaboration Moderator Services: Supporting Knowledge Based Collaboration

Collaboration Moderator Services (CMS) as an evolution of earlier Moderator research has emerged to address the issues relating to knowledge based collaboration by providing a set of functionalities such as raising awareness of business opportunities, problems areas, conflicts, change in the item of interests and lessons learned from collaboration. This paper presents a framework for learning CMS within the context of SYNERGY project. It has been shown that knowledge miners of CMS can be used to learn from the databases of the collaborative networked organizations (CNO) and semi-automatically update the CMS Knowledge Base. A case study from construction project has been used to show that the knowledge miner of CMS can “learn” by extracting various kinds of knowledge from Post Project Reports (PPRs) using different text mining techniques. The discovered knowledge in the form of rules relates to improving the processes, identifying recurring problems, good and bad practices, improving customer relationships and enhancing the coordination between members of CNO.