Modeling Contexts of Knowledge Sharing in an Online Community for Oral Medicine

Paper in proceeding, 2007

To support knowledge sharing between practitioners of oral medicine throughout Sweden, the SOMWeb system for community collaboration has been constructed, based on Semantic Web technologies. A large function of the system is to support the discussion of difficult and interesting cases at a monthly telephone conference. From our observations of these meetings, a the users’ responses to a questionnaire, and discussions with users, we find that many of the improvements that can be made to enable further use of the system relate to adding the use of context. Some initial thoughts on what would be relevant to represent in relation to context are given, such as the experience of the practitioner, the reason for adding a case to the system, and the current activity of the user. The long-term aims of this work is to identify aspects of context relevant to online communities of practice in healthcare, and to investigate how these contexts can be modeled using Semantic Web technologies.