Context-Based Knowledge Creation and Sharing in Cross-Cultural Collaborative Communities

Virtual communities rely primarily on ICT to connect their members to work together, and to share knowledge and practices. The importance of virtual collaborative work is increasing not only because of its economical and environmental benefits, but also due to its flexibility for establishing dynamically new cross-organizational and cross-cultural innovative teams. Virtual collaborative spaces should support their joint activities. In order to design and realize such spaces, an understanding of the tasks to be carried out by the virtual community is necessary, as well as an understanding of the related processes, contexts, and knowledge. In our paper, we introduce a reference model of a Cross-Cultural Cyber Space (CCS) for context-based knowledge creation and sharing between the members of the cross-cultural collaborative community. We also describe the prototype implementation of the CCS, a 3D cross-cultural art museum system.