A social interaction analysis methodology for improving E-collaboration over the Internet

Collaborative projects are relatively complex and are therefore difficult to handle. The effective management of the distributed processes and knowledge is essential to enhancing the electronic collaboration over the Internet. This paper presents a systematic approach to support online collaboration by modeling and analyzing stakeholders' knowledge perspectives within their social interactions. By investigating the key issues relating to cooperative activities, it obtains deep understandings of stakeholders' perspective and its impacts to collaboration. This research develops a computational knowledge perspective model and a perspective analysis methodology, which can provide the basis for collaboration support based on the social construction theory. It also introduces a Web-based information system to improve the collaboration by providing perspective analysis function. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.