Speaker
Description
A University is a high citadel of learning and the centre for research, innovation and economic development. Nigeria has 170 Universities (Federal = 43; State = 48; Private = 79) as approved by National University Commission. Knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst Universities is very important because they help to improve the quality of researches and capacity building. Collaboration amongst Universities in Europe and USA is very good but very limited amongst Nigerian Universities, hence making resource sharing very difficult amongst Nigerian researchers. Additionally, data from each University is largely managed locally with limited access to external bodies. This lack of information sharing is a major hindrance to the building and management of a quality national knowledge. Technological advancement in communication and internet technology has given birth to Knowledge Grid (KG). KG offers tools for sharing and management of distributed heterogeneous resources spread across various locations. KG has been adopted in Europe, Asia, and USA but not in Nigeria. A KG model for Nigeria will provide a good platform for various Nigerian Universities to pool their resources together and hence make their electronic resources available and accessible for knowledge building and management. In this research works, a framework of an improved academic Knowledge Grid model that could help to facilitate collaboration among universities in Nigeria and hence make knowledge sharing easy is proposed. The proposed model is three major components: User interface with user login interaction module, Semantic Engine which consists of the Knowledge Space and semantic matching and Knowledge based. The initial analysis of the proposed model suggests that it is efficient than the existing academic or business models. The proposed Knowledge Grid model will allow collaboration among universities in Nigeria and hence facilitates knowledge sharing.
