A Document Reuse Tool for Communities of Practice

With the rise of the Internet, virtual communities of practice are gaining importance as a mean of sharing and exchanging information. In such environments, information reuse is of major concern. In this paper, we outline the importance of enriching documents with structural and semantic information in order to facilitate their reuse. We propose a framework for document reuse based on an explicit representation of the logical structure as well as links to domain ontologies. Such explicit representation facilitates the understanding of the original documents and helps considerably in automating the reuse process. Document reuse automation is based on matching techniques that consider several criteria including semantic and logical similarities.