Reducing Impediments to Collaboration in a Virtual World

This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to reducing impediments to collaboration in a distributed environment. A major impediment to such collaboration is the issue of communications - clearly and efficiently expressing the desires of every stakeholder in the process, as well as the major decisions and the rationale behind these decisions. The approach described in this paper, embodied in the MATE system, provides a framework for making these decisions in the engineering design process, by eliciting and capturing the goals and desires of every stakeholder in the design process through utility and expense functions. The system uses a four faceted knowledge-based approach of knowledge acquisition, discovery, management and repository to focus on various areas of functionality to be used in the design process. The MATE approach will be combined with the SSPARCy approach, also developed in this group, to address crucial applications that are today contingent on geographical proximity to occur with equal or superior effectiveness in a virtual world. While this paper analyzes a situation involving engineering design, the proposed knowledge-based approach is equally applicable to collaboration in business, healthcare, government, and other environments