Title: A reference profile ontology for communities of practice

Authors: Joao L.T. Da Silva; Alexandre Moretto Ribeiro; Elisa Boff; Tiago Thompsen Primo; Rosa Maria Viccari

Addresses: Universidade de Caxias do Sul (UCS), Caxias do Sul, RS, Brazil. ' Universidade de Caxias do Sul (UCS), Caxias do Sul, RS, Brazil. ' Universidade de Caxias do Sul (UCS), Caxias do Sul, RS, Brazil. ' Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. ' Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

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.

Keywords: CoP; communities of practice; ontologies; collaborative learning; semantic web; reference ontology; user profiles.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2012.050181

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2012 Vol.7 No.3, pp.185 - 196

Received: 19 Dec 2011
Accepted: 24 May 2012
Published online: 31 Dec 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article