A reference profile ontology for communities of practice. (1st January 2012)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: da Silva, Joao L.T.; Ribeiro, Alexandre Moretto; Boff, Elisa; Primo, Tiago Thompsen; Viccari, Rosa Maria
• Is Part Of: International journal of metadata, semantics and ontologies. Volume 7:Number 3(2012)
• Page Start: 185
• Page End: 196
• Publication Date: 2012-01-01
• Subjects: CoP -- communities of practice -- ontologies -- collaborative learning -- semantic web; Metadata -- Periodicals; Semantic Web -- Periodicals; Ontologies (Information retrieval) -- Periodicals; Data structures (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Information theory -- Periodicals; 005.74
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-2621

Abstract

Communities of Practice (CoP) integrate people in a group in order to learn in a collaborative way. It is necessary to establish in these communities a formal and standardised representation of the knowledge and interests that emerge from CoP. With this scenario in mind, this paper presents a reference ontology for a user profile representation in a CoP Framework (CoPF). The main idea of this framework is to provide virtual CoP for collaborative learning by using semantic web technologies. This work proposes a foundational ontology for a general profile to be used as a guideline to build a computational CoPF, which is semantic web compliant. In this paper we summarise a first proposition of the CoPF ontology development focusing on the ontological user profile. We also present the methodological aspects of the ontological CoPF and also illustrate a case study applying the ontological user profile.