Building a community memory in communities of practice of e‐learning: A knowledge engineering approach

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to define a community memory for a virtual communities of practice (CoP) based on organizational learning (OL) concept and ontologies.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper focuses on applying the OL concept to virtual CoP and proposes a framework for building the CoP memory by identifying several layers of ontologies such as generic, knowledge, domain, and task ontologies. A CoP of e‐learning is used as an example of semantic learning organization and as an application for the proposed framework.

Findings

Applying the proposed framework on the CoP of e‐learning and more specifically in the instructional engineering domain shows that community knowledge can be reified and shared among the members. This framework can be used as a backbone for other CoP in other fields.

Originality/value

This present work proposed a general framework for the CoP memory using a knowledge engineering approach and proposing different forms of ontologies as a backbone for the memory. It also suggests that the knowledge capitalization is important as well as the contextual element.

Citation

Sarirete, A., Chikh, A. and Noble, E. (2011), "Building a community memory in communities of practice of e‐learning: A knowledge engineering approach", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 23 No. 7, pp. 456-467. https://doi.org/10.1108/13665621111162972