Multimedia mining of collaborative virtual workspaces: An integrative framework for extracting and integrating collaborative process knowledge

The transfer and utilisation of discovered patterns, their management and reuse, is the least explored area in the knowledge discovery process, namely, because the research in the area has been focused on the actual discovery techniques, rather than on what happens after that. This chapter presents recently developed framework for the integration of knowledge discovery with knowledge transfer and utilisation in the area of collaborative virtual workspaces, which support knowledge-intensive collaborative processes. These workspaces have been selected for their ability to provide consistent multimedia data sets, integrating heterogeneous project data records, including logs of activities and various artefacts (media documents) that are part of the data flow, processed during the collaboration project. The ideas behind the framework are illustrated in obtaining insights about computer-mediated collaboration in such systems and reusing discovered knowledge in the design of new workspaces developed in LiveNet - an underlying technology that supports knowledge-intensive work processes.