ka2

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KA2 & ontologies for communities of practice
This page http://tagunity.wikispaces.com/ka2 DRAFT 1160364729 600 words

The conceptual overlaps or convergence between the theories of communities of practice (CoPs) and the creation and use of formal ontologies has been the subject of limited research, including for instance, some arguably misguided assumptions and subsequent analysis about the KA2 project, also known as (KA)2.

John Domingue and his colleagues argue: "ontologies can serve as symbolic tools within a community of practice supporting communication and knowledge sharing," (Domingue, Motta, Buckingham-Shum, Vargas-Vera, Kalfoglou, & Farnes, 2001, abstract, p. 30). Of course this may or may not become true depending on who get to create and use the ontology (see however community_driven_metadata_management).

The KA2 approach to ontology development and implementation exemplifies some assumption that deserve to be unpacked, and give rise to questions relating to the development of consensus within a community, never-mind if the community of portal users may be a minority within a larger community of practice. Domingue and his colleagues acknowledge the crucial role of the knowledge or ontology engineers in analysing a communities knowledge domain, and the terminology that will ultimately be used to represent it: > knowledge engineers are crucial in the ontology development phase. ... The ontology specifies the **selected communal viewpoint**, circumscribes the range of phenomena **we** want to deal with and defines the terminology used to acquire domain knowledge. In our experience small errors/inconsistencies in any of these aspects can make the difference between success and failure. Moreover, ontology design requires specialist skills which are normally not possessed by the members of our target user communities. (Domingue, Motta, Buckingham-Shum, Vargas-Vera, Kalfoglou, & Farnes, 2001, abstract, p. 30, emphasis added)

Acknowledging Lave and Wenger (1991), and Wenger (1998) Domingue et al. (2001, p. 30) explain that, "Practices emerge through the interplay of informal processes with symbolic codifications and artifacts." They add: > We show that when a community's perspective on an issue is **stable** (i.e. there is reasonable consensus), it opens the possibility for introducing knowledge services, based on an ontology constructed by knowledge engineers with stakeholders. The ontology reflects a 'shared world view', codifying 'well defined roles', 'specified criteria' and 'codified procedures.' Throughout, we regard representations such as ontologies as boundary objects [Bowker & Star, 1999] whose role is to support communication and negotiation over meaning between stakeholders within and across communities of practice. (Domingue, Motta, Buckingham-Shum, Vargas-Vera, Kalfoglou, & Farnes, 2001, abstract, p. 30, emphasis added)

Arguably Domingue et al. have missed the point about the dynamic nature of knowledge sharing in a community of practice (CoP). In a community meaning is often ambiguous; indeed perhaps the desire of members to resolve ambiguities may be a key reasons people get together and talk about their shared practices, in turn to create and share stories, build shared understandings and meanings. In Domingue's interpretation of CoPs knowledge has already been created. The knowledge is not socially-multifaceted, but rather can be represented in a singular ontological repository. Domingue’s initial assumption on which the ontology is built is that a reasonable of consensus already exists, and that is can be captured to represent that shared view of the community. The knowledge, once captured and codified for reuse a cross the portal, or indeed other systems that can inter-operate with the ontology. But is the KA2 representation the 'community's' knowledge dynamic enough to say that it can be an accurate representation of what CoP members in KA2 know in practice? The assumptions outlined in the quotations used above suggest there is a gap between CoPs theory, as based on ethnographic field work, and the reductive approach implicit in the writing of Domingue and his colleagues.

Internal links
e.g.
 * community_driven_metadata_management