Knowledge Support for Collaborative Workspaces: The Cospaces Approach

The overall objective of the CoSpaces Integrated Project (IP) is to develop organisational models and distributed technologies that support innovative collaborative workspaces for individuals and project teams within distributed virtual manufacturing enterprises, so as to establish effective partnerships, collaborate, be creative, improve productivity, reduce the length of design cycles and take a holistic approach to implementing product phases. The project aims to achieve this through enhanced human communication, innovative visualisation, knowledge support and natural interaction [1]. This paper discusses the knowledge-related dimension of CoSpace that is handled by the CoSpaces Knowledge Component. Such a component is, indeed, a set of ontology-enabled knowledge services (named CoSKS), which provides the appropriate functionalities to support the knowledge requirements identified as part of the operational scenarios of the project. CoSKS is introduced here, through the description of the major conceptual axes guiding its development, the operational environment (or the context of work), the requirements guiding the development of CoSKS and, finally, the CoSKS conceptual architecture including also relevant topics for this discussion (e.g. the CoSpaces ontology, the knowledge items/objects, etc.). Conclusions and future work close the paper.