CRAFT, and not the macaroni

Title: CRAFTing an Environment for Collaborative Reasoning

Author(s): Susanne C. Hupfer, Steven I. Ross, Jamie C. Rasmussen, James E. Christensen, Stephen E. Levy,Daniel M. Gruen, John F. Patterson

Summary: The authors of this article attempt to explain their goal of reducing a lot of the redundant and wasteful research time that goes into a lot of collaborative reasoning, such as corporate research, wiki's, etc. Since collaborative reasoning typically involves several people, and evolving goals and interest avenues that must be explored, there are usually some areas of that research that could be greatly sped up if access to previous research on the same topic was made easily accessible. So the authors set about to create a client program that could be used to accomplish this task, by allowing users to create certain objects and entities that could describe collaborative reasoning topics, and they called it CRAFT (Collaborative Reasoning and Analysis Framework andToolkit). This program would basically speed up the research process by providing a vital link to past research done through the creation of machine-interpretable entities, as described above.

Shaun's Opinion: I think this article is a very good attempt at creating a more efficient research mechanism for corporations, especially. Even in my own work I have seen examples of wasted time (and money) used on researching topics or products that have already been thoroughly researched by someone else within the company. However, I do think that the "entity" system could probably be made into more user friendly terms and perhaps layout. This system could be broken down into companies or products or people, etc, instead of making it too generic to be very useful.