Strengthening collaborative data analysis and decision making in web communities

Generally speaking, modern research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative in nature. Researchers need to collaborate and make decisions by meaningfully assembling, mining and analyzing available large-scale volumes of complex multi-faceted data residing in different sources. At the same time, they need to efficiently and effectively exploit services available over the Web. Arguing that dealing with data-intensive and cognitively complex settings is not a technical problem alone, this paper presents a novel collaboration support platform for Web communities. The proposed solution adopts a hybrid approach that builds on the synergy between machine and human intelligence to facilitate the underlying sense-making and decision making processes. User experience shows that the platform enables stakeholders to make better, more informed and quicker decisions. The functionalities of the proposed platform are described through a real-world case from a biomedical research community.