Capitalizing Knowledge in Communities of Practice of e-learning: Ontology-based Community Memory

Abstract

Together members of a community of practice (CoP) share their expertise and mutual understanding about a common domain to develop greater knowledge and build best practices. Due to the informal character of learning within a CoP, most of the knowledge is mainly tacit and needs to be reified and capitalized. The aim of this paper is to model the CoP to include the community memory in order to manage its knowledge. A CoP is considered as a learning organization where members are interacting, producing, exchanging and adapting resources and knowledge to meet their needs. The CoP memory is based on a framework with several ontologies including knowledge, domain and task ontology. The application of the proposed framework is done through a CoP of e-learning.