Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

Chapter 7
Mining Unnoticed Knowledge in
Collaboration Support Systems
ABSTRACT
George Gkotsis
University of Patras, Greece
Nikos Tsirakis
University of Patras, Greece
Numerous tools aiming at facilitating or enhancing collaboration among members of diverse communities
have been already deployed and tested over the Web. Focusing on the particularities of online communities
of practice (CoPs), this chapter introduces a framework for mining knowledge that is hidden in such
settings. The authors’ motivation stems from the criticism that contemporary tools receive regarding
lack of active participation and limited engagement in their use, which is partially due to the inability of
identifying and exploiting a set of important relationships among community members and the associated
collaboration-related assets. The authors’ overall approach elaborates and integrates issues from the
data mining and the social networking disciplines. More specifically, the proposed framework enables
CoPs members to rank the contributions of their peers towards identifying meaningful relationships, as
well as valuable information about roles and competences. In the context of this chapter, the authors first
model the characteristics of the overall collaboration setting and propose a set of associated metrics.
Next, in order to reveal unnoticed knowledge which resides within CoPs, a data mining technique that
groups users into clusters and applies advanced social networking analysis on them is proposed. Finally,
the authors discuss the benefits of their approach and conclude with future work plans.
GETTING STARTED
As information diffusion is becoming enormous,
contemporary knowledge workers are facing a series
of problems. People are straggling when trying to
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-711-9.ch007
Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
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filter relevant information, extract knowledge out of
it, and apply specific practices on a problem under
consideration. This phenomenon, broadly known
as “information overload”, has currently raised
new, challenging, but not fully addressed issues.
It is widely undisputed that one of the best means
to keep a knowledge worker’s competence high is