SEMANTICS AND KNOWLEDGE CAPITALIZATION IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE OF E-LEARNING

Knowledge management in Communities of Practice of E-learning (CoPEs) is challenged by several issues: the complexity of knowledge, considered as interdisciplinary (psycho-cognitive, pedagogic, software oriented, and hardware-oriented), the difficulty to access and reuse that knowledge, and the complexity of the knowledge capitalization process. Most of the knowledge exchanged is mainly tacit, based on direct communication between members, and therefore needs to be elicited and represented in a formal way to be capitalized. Explicit knowledge is generally shared and accessible through the CoPE's repositories. However, it is not always well elicited and organized. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based framework for capitalizing knowledge for reuse in CoPEs. We show through an example of use how semantics can contribute to the management of the tacit knowledge that the community members own and therefore to the improvement of the learning process in CoPEs.