Towards Ontological Profiles in Communities of Practice

Nowadays more and more the use of Information and Communication Technologies in educational contexts extends the dimensions of group learning and claims for more effective collaborative learning. As the social networking and e-learning technologies are growing, they tend towards closer to a social learning approach. In order to cope with this trends, several authors claim about using Communities of Practice (CoP) as a structuring characteristics towards social learning activities. Meanwhile, in the knowledge sharing between groups of people who learn collaboratively, it becomes necessary to establish a standardized and formal representation of interests along with tacit/explicit knowledge present in the community. Also, in a social network perspective we need to keep this representation compliant with a semantic web approach. Our work aims to establish a foundational ontology for a general profile that can be used as guideline to build a computational CoP framework for realizing such a compliance. In this paper we summarize an ontology development of the general framework for CoP with a main focus on the ontological user profile in order to define a reference ontology that can become adaptable to the needs of a CoP. Two case studies are also presented in order to illustrate the ontological user profile possibilities.