Title: On the exploitation of relationships in online communities of practice

Authors: G. Gkotsis, Nikos Karacapilidis, Nikos Tsirakis

Addresses: Industrial Management and Information Systems Lab, MEAD, University of Patras, 26500 Rio Patras, Greece. ' Industrial Management and Information Systems Lab, MEAD, University of Patras, 26500 Rio Patras, Greece. ' Computer Engineering and Informatics Department, University of Patras, 26500 Rio Patras, Greece

Abstract: Numerous tools aiming at facilitating or enhancing collaboration among members of diverse communities have been already deployed and tested over the web. Taking into account the particularities of online communities of practice, this paper introduces a framework for mining knowledge that is hidden in such settings. Our motivation stems from the criticism that contemporary tools receive regarding lack of active participation and limited engagement in their use, partially due to their inability of identifying and meaningfully exploiting important relationships among community members and collaboration-related assets. Particular attention is given to the identification of requirements imposed by contemporary communities and learning contexts. Our overall approach elaborates and integrates issues from the disciplines of data mining and social networking.

Keywords: community of practice; online CoPs; clustering; data mining; knowledge discovery; social network analysis; collaboration; social networking; web based communities; virtual communities; online communities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCENT.2011.040666

International Journal of Collaborative Enterprise, 2011 Vol.2 No.1, pp.75 - 86

Published online: 15 Jun 2011 *

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