The origin, representation, and use of collaboration patterns in a medical community of practice

Abstract

Founded on the Semantic Web technologies OWL and RDF, SOMWeb is an online community of practice that is used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within an oral medicine community in Sweden. It is shown how patterns for communication and collaboration within SOMWeb can be identified and represented in OWL, in terms of knowledge components, such as ontologies describing domain knowledge, user models, and organization models. It is described how patterns could be put into use and inform the design of future versions of SOMWeb. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.