Knowledge Grid: An Intelligent System for Collaboration and Knowledge Management in Nigerian Universities

Nigeria has 169 universities approved by National University Commission (NUC) with 43 Federal Universities, 47 State Universities and 79 Private Universities. The universities are located in different geographical areas and collaboration among these universities is difficult and this makes accessibility to data and information resource of the universities a problem. As a result quite a number of knowledge built from these resources are locally managed within each university private network that is not shared with other universities due to lack of virtual collaboration on a grid computing platform. Knowledge building and management in a country is a function of the information that one could have access to with ease but non-collaboration of the universities in a virtual environment is a hindrance to quality national knowledge building and management. Thus the need arises to embrace grid system as platform for all universities to pool their resources together and hence make their information resources available and accessible for knowledge building and management. This report presents an overview of Nigeria universities’ operations as regard their research and innovation policies and vis-a-vis governance and resource management across public and private universities. Also we did a systematic review and analysis of knowledge grid (KG) technology vis-a-vis its use for knowledge management in Nigerian universities. We focused on identifying the strengths and challenges of knowledge grid development and implementation vis-a-vis the technological, economic and social implications involved in the process. Our future work is to develop a robust knowledge grid model that will allow collaboration among universities in Nigerian community and hence facilitates information and knowledge sharing and management among the universities.