Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

tives have been negotiated with CoP members to
answer their specific needs. The basic idea is to
keep track of the updates made to the template
in a mapping file, and to identify the portions of
the template that require a revalidation because
of these updates. From the mapping file, a transformation
script is generated automatically and
the document portions affected by those updates
can then be identified and adapted in an automatic
manner. For this, we first propose a taxonomy of
atomic evolution primitives.
As in Guerrini et al. (2006) we consider three
categories of atomic evolution primitives: insertion,
modification, and deletion. These primitives
are applied to types and elements (as defined in the
XTiger specification). Moreover, modifications
can be further classified in three sub-categories:
structural, re-labelling, and migration modifications.
Structural modifications allow to modify
the type of an element and its constraints (e.g.
cardinality constraints). Re-labelling modifications
allow to change the name of an element/
type. Migration modifications cover two cases,
first moving a sub-element from an element to
another one and second transforming a local type/
element to a global type/element (and vice versa).
In order to ensure that the modified template
remains well formed and valid according to the
XTiger specifications, applicability conditions
are enforced on each primitive.
Moreover, we propose high level primitives in
order to express more complex updates. A high
level primitive is represented as a sequence of
atomic primitives that can be executed as a single
operation. These primitives have been introduced
to facilitate the template evolution task for CoP
members and to describe more common sequence
of atomic primitives. Examples of high level
primitives include: Aggregator primitives: they
mainly include primitives for inserting, moving,
changing whole substructures rather than a single
element at a time; Merge/split primitives: Elements
values are not always represented at the same
level of atomicity. For example the author name
22
A Document Reuse Tool for Communities of Practice
in the template of figure 2 is represented using
an element of type string. However, as described
in the motivating example 2, for a given reason a
new design choice could be to separate the author
name into a First-Name and a Last-name. For
such cases, instead of removing the elements and
inserting new ones without any guarantee that the
content will be preserved, we define two operations
Merge and Split to perform this task and ensure
that the content will be preserved.
Figure 4 depicts the template driven evolution
service interface. Two categories of evolution
primitives are presented: primitives applied to
template elements and the ones applied to types.
The template is graphically presented using the
form metaphor as in the template-driven structuring
tool. The user has just to select the template
element/type he wants to modify, only applicable
evolution primitives can then be applied. The
template is updated (new XTiger code is generated
in a transparent manner). Instances are then
automatically transformed.
SUMMARY
Communities of practice are social networks
of relationships that provide information,
knowledge, and a space where people interact
for mutual benefit. This paper studies document
content reuse problem within CoPs. Faced with
the diversity of documents formats, content and
goals, a critical step in document reuse is to make
such documents self-explaining. The main idea
is that by enriching original documents with an
explicit logical structure, we can assist authors
in the reuse process. This is done by proposing
a template-driven editing approach in order to
produce structured documents.
In order to reuse such documents, two services
are proposed: the first one determines similarities
between two templates (source and target)
using matching techniques and then generates
automatically a transformation script able to re-