Using Ontologies for Monitoring Knowledge Evolution in Communities of Practice

Social networks gather people exchanging information continuously and building knowledge. Knowing what goes on in such groups is difficult. However, the social web is in part organized around communities of practice (CoP) and it could benefit from some advances in the CoP area. In a CoP a given person describes a trajectory into and within the CoP, starting from an outside circle with little interaction, and progressing towards an inner circle where one finds people actually supporting the community. One of the problems for the people in the inner circle is to monitor what is going on, i.e. to follow the major discussions and to keep track of new appearing concepts, in order to influence the choice of the topics and to keep the community under some level of control. Using an ontology to classify the exchanged messages and to process them allows building two-dimensional maps of the discussed concepts, to analyze possible drifts or detect the appearance of new topics. The same approach, described in this paper, could be applied to social networks.