Research cluster Knowledge-based Virtual Collaboration Environments

• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörg Haake, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Lehrgebiet Kooperative Systeme
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Hemmje, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Lehrgebiet Multimedia und Internetanwendungen
• Prof. Dr. Jörg Keller, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Lehrgebiet Parallelität und VLSI
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfram Schiffmann, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Lehrgebiet Rechnerarchitektur
• Prof. Dr. Gunter Schlageter, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik; Lehrgebiet Informationssysteme und Datenbanken
• Prof. Dr. Christoph Beierle, Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik, Lehrgebiet Wissensbasierte Systeme
• Prof. Dr. Ulrich Wackerbarth, Fakultät für Rechtswissenschaft, Lehrgebiet für Bürgerliches Recht, Unternehmensrecht und Rechtsvergleichung

Brief summary of the research area:

Collaborative work and learning plays an important role in our global economy, which is increasingly based on knowledge production and fast innovation cycles. In a networked world such collaborative processes can only be executed through dedicated computer support. The Knowledge-based Virtual Collaborative Work Environments (CWE) research area investigates the design and development of next generation CWEs supporting research and advanced product-innovation oriented R& D activities within organizational and cross-organizational innovation processes. These processes are typically dealing with knowledge-intensive collaborative research, design, and engineering activities between and across various domains of expertise. Intended research results include design principles, design methods and IT-support for developing Knowledge-based Virtual CWEs, including an upper layer middleware platform and tools supporting the design, implementation, and use of such environments.

The research will be situated in two application areas: industrial design processes (e.g. in the automotive industry) and e-science based research. Both areas require interdisciplinary research, which by nature requires collaboration among engineers and scientists from different disciplines in order to solve complex problems or construct innovative solutions. Therefore, e-science-oriented CWEs, which aim at supporting the joint set-up, definition and execution of joint research processes, are under investigation in CWE. Today, these CWEs merely support the set-up of shared workspaces, allowing some access to shared data or experiments and communication within the team. However, methods and tools for effective development and use of CWEs for design and e-science are still missing.

In the CWE research area methods and infrastructure/tools will be developed that facilitates development and use of IT-supported CWEs for professional users, which support the collaboration between humans and research as well as innovative engineering processes performed in virtual teams. Such a CWE should also facilitate the collaboration of experts in their specific domains of expertise, turning them into a quasi virtual research or innovation team. Within the research area, the main focus of research work is therefore on creating the seamless support for the exchange of knowledge and information between these expert co-workers and their separated research and innovation workspaces, including their organization’s innovation resources (research publications, experimental data, project reports, product specifications and data, digital design artefacts, process descriptions, etc.).

To cope with all aspects of these research topics, the RA is supported and carried by scientists of 7 chairs of the University of Hagen. Thus, the interdisciplinary field of knowledge based virtual collaboration environments can be investigated from different perspectives, be it communication, content, media, information and knowledge representation, as well as remote collaboration, sharing of resources, security and enterprise law.

Contributions of this group:

Research of our group in this research cluster focuses on understanding how collaborative work and learning (i.e., knowledge production and knowledge transfer) in distributed organisations can be supported through IT, especially distributed web-based systems. Using the design-based research method, we study cases of distributed collaborative work and learning by designing IT support and evaluating it in field studies and experiments. Research topics include concepts and architectures for Internet-based collaboration environments, user-centered design (e.g. tailoring methods and support, agile user-centered groupware development processes and pattern languages, or context-based appropriation support), and frameworks/middleware for their implementation. In addition, we study methods of facilitating collaborative learning and communities, e.g. through computer-supported collaboration scripts and teaching methods, and their impact on the design and implementation of collaboration environments. Methods like contextual cooperation and shared hypermedia workspaces are investigated as a means to integrate general computer supported cooperation support with a goal-specific collaboration context, i.e. with the organisation, technological infrastructure, business processes, knowledge productions methods, documents etc. Related research projects of our group include:

• MAPPER (Model-based Adaptive Project and Process Engineering): here we develop a service-oriented web-based collaboration platform for virtual organisations. Based on collaborative modelling of the business processes the collaboration platform is automatically configured and adapted to the needs of the users.
• GridLab (Grid-based Remote Laboratories): together with the computer architecture group of Prof. Schiffmann we develop a web-based infrastructure for making remote labs accessible to distributed groups of users. Through a collaboration portal, remote labs can be configured, booked, and collaboratively used by a distributed group.
• CURE (Collaborative Learning Platform of the FUH): here we continue to develop a generic web-based collaboration platform supporting self-organising working and learning groups.
• EXTERNAL - Extended Enterprise Resources, Network Architectures and Learning: here we developed a collaborative environment fort he joint definition and execution of flexible, collaborative workflows in virtual enterprises.

Finished Ph.D. theses of the group associated to this cluster:

• Daniel Tietze (2001): A framework for developing component-based co-operative applications, Ph.D. thesis accepted at department of CS, Darmstadt University of Technology, 09/02/2001
• Jessica Rubart (2005): Model-based and component-oriented support for knowledge-intensive cooperation (in German), Ph.D. thesis accepted at department of CS, University of Hagen, 12/02/2005
• Till Schümmer (2005): A Pattern Approach for End-User Centered Groupware Development, Ph.D. thesis accepted at department of CS, University of Hagen, 05/07/2005
• Alejandro Fernandez (2005): Groupware for collaborative Tailoring, Ph.D. thesis accepted at department of CS, University of Hagen, 06/07/2005