A knowledge capture framework for remote collaborative virtual environments

Due to globalization, the need for geographically separated teams to collaborate on engineering tasks and learn from each other has increased. As a result, being able to observe and hence understand the actions of others in collaborative sessions is very important because it enables the users to work towards a common task’s goal. In this work, we propose and develop a novel collaborative knowledge framework that can be used to achieve a common task understanding during remote collaborative tasks. The collaborative knowledge framework provides playback and reuse facilities to enable the storage of knowledge elements (i.e. utterances, manipulations of shared representations, documents accessed during a collaborative session) as well as their recall in future engineering tasks. We validate the framework using an automotive use case.