A Prototypal Environment for Collaborative Work within a Research Organization

A research organization is a complex system consisting of various kinds of components and actors with a high level of cooperation. Collaborative work takes place through both formalized groups (such as sections, internal committees, research groups, project groups) and informal groups (i.e., communities of practice) that may arise around common problems, interests and objectives (e.g., a research topic, the production of a publication, the use of a technology, etc.). It may happen that groups are geographically distributed over different locations. From this the need of technologies and tools addressing the information sharing needs within research organizations. This paper presents an experimental knowledge management tool, the ICAR Knowledge Portal, running at ICAR-CNR, a research institute of the Italian National Council of Research. The task of this tool is basically to provide a web-based environment for knowledge creation, sharing and access. In fact, with the ICAR Knowledge Portal, users can quickly set up their own sub-portals, create and organize knowledge items (such as news, papers, links, announcements, projects, etc.), share them within workgroups, search for a specific document or browse through a set of related documents (ontology-driven browsing).