Mediating Ontologies for Communities of Practice

Knowledge management technologies are widely used in organizational information systems. However, the knowledge representations in these systems reflect the formal organization more than informal structures like communities of practice. To overcome the gap between the informal and formal knowledge structures within an organization, we can apply ontology mediation techniques which can detect similarities and dissimilarities between two or more different ontologies which reflect the current practice of terminology use in a community of practice. In this paper, we compare such ontology mediation techniques and introduce a semi-automatic ontology mediation system for communities of practice called COSMO. This system can be used to facilitate informal organizational structures within formal organizational information systems like workflow management systems.