rationale

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Rationale for this research
This page http://tagunity.wikispaces.com/rationale Update 1160646043 300 words

Why investigate the connections and overlaps in the literature related to knowledge sharing and the use of online tagging applications?

1. Technology

 * Many observers argue that 'community' information and knowledge sharing are enabled by online applications that support social tagging (e.g. [|CiteULike]; [|Del.icio.us]™ and ([|Flickr]™)
 * Large corporation have begun to experiment with social bookmarking applications that bring [|Del.icio.us]™ type functionality inside the corporate firewall (see, for example: IBM's dogear; Mitre Corporation's Omni)
 * There is a substantial amount of research devoted to the creation of formal classification tools (i.e. the Semantic Web research project, with the associated literature on the creation of formal ontologies)
 * Some of this research mentions 'communities of practice', and emphasises the importance of understanding the role of environmental context in understanding knowledge sharing using, for example, semantic community portals

2. Practice based theories (PBTs)

 * The term 'community of practice' is used multiple contexts
 * The Communities of Practice (CoPs) literature is distributed across multiple fields (e.g. knowledge management, e-learning)
 * There have been several books and other publications on the role of online technology in supporting CoPs, virtual teams, and more specialised concepts such as computer supported collaborative work, Electronic Network of Practice (ENoPs), etc
 * An activity theory was used as a research methodology to investigate "the potential contributions of social-cultural and learning theories to the task of managing content in e-learning environments," (Mwanza & Engeström, 2005, abstract)
 * Actor-network theory has been used widely to investigate the development and adoption of new technologies and associated practices

It appears however, that while CoPs are often written about in the context of knowledge sharing, (e.g. in the knowledge management literature), there are few, if any, published studies on the application of technologies that support social tagging. The same is largely true for research into the use of ontologies, and tools that enable users to create ontology instances.