Context-based Semantic Annotations in Copes: an Ontological and Rule-based Approach

Knowledge capitalization is one of many problems facing online communities of practice (CoPs). Knowledge accumulated through the participation in the community must be capitalized for future reuse. Most of proposals are specific and focus on knowledge modeling disregarding the reuse of that knowledge. In this paper, we are particularly interested on CoPs of e-learning (CoPEs) and we propose a knowledge capitalization approach within the framework of a CoPE, based on contextual semantic annotations. The proposed knowledge capitalization process is organized as a five-step cycle: 1) Acquisition and modeling, 2) storage, 3) share and reuse, 4) evaluation and 5) update. To deal with this process we use a contextual semantic annotation model. The annotations aim to model both CoPEs members’ tacit and explicit knowledge. The context represents the situation in which the members create or reuse the annotation. A prototype called “CoPEAnnot” has been developed to illustrate our knowledge capitalization process. Ontological and rule-based context reasoning have been used to improve knowledge reuse, by adapting CoPEAnnot features according to the current activity context of members.