Engineering Moderator to Universal Knowledge Moderator for Moderating Collaborative Projects

One of the major issues in multi-discipline collaborative projects is how to best share and simultaneously exploit different types of expertise, without duplicating efforts or inadvertently causing conflicts or loss of efficiency through misunderstanding of individual or shared goals. This research discusses the development of moderators from the initial concepts of an engineering moderator to ongoing research into universal knowledge moderator on semantic web. Moderators are knowledge based specialist intelligent software systems which support each individual of a team to perform his particular role from a position of strength, using his preferred method of working whilst understanding the need of other team members and the whole team working on a collaborative project. Current research proposes an improved framework based on semantic web and knowledge discovery for moderators to enhance globally collaborative e-manufacturing work through better interoperability and efficiency. A universal knowledge moderator prototype system consisting of an enterprise data integration module, knowledge discovery module and moderation module is developed to significantly improve the moderation activities and performance of collaborative e-manufacturing.