ONTOCOPI and Tools for Identifying Communities of Practice

The paper describes ONTOCOPI, a tool for identifYing communities of practice (COPs) by analysing ontologies of the relevant working domain. COP identification is currently a resource-heavy process largely based on interviews. ONTOCOPI attempts to uncover informal COP relations by spotting patterns in the formal relations represented in ontologies, traversing the ontology from instance to instance via selected relations. Experiments to determine particular COPs from an academic ontology are described, showing how the alteration of threshold and temporal settings, and the weights applied to the ontology's relations affect the composition ofthe identified COP.