Supporting Knowledge Management and Collaboration in Research Communities Using Automatically Created Research Portals

Becker Jörg, Heide Tobias, Knackstedt Ralf, Steinhorst Matthias

Zusammenfassung
Research portals have been proposed as a means of managing knowledge and fostering collaboration inresearch communities. However, implementing and maintaining a research portal is costly and involves alot of technical knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a research portal generator designed toautomatically create such portals. The generator provides a configurable set of knowledge management andcollaboration features. The purpose of the generator is to ease the process of setting up and using a researchportal. The paper contributes to promoting research portals as a means of sharing knowledge and facilitatingcollaboration in research communities. Following a design science research process, the authors deriveobjectives for a research portal generator, iteratively implement these objectives, and evaluate the functionalityof the created portals against the current state of the art of 813 research portals. They demonstrate thatportals created by the generator exhibit a consistently higher level of maturity than research portals currentlypresent on the Internet.