Knowledge map creation and maintenance for virtual communities of practice

This paper proposes a knowledge map management system to facilitate knowledge management in virtual communities of practice. To realize the proposed knowledge map management, we develop knowledge map creation and maintenance functions by utilizing information retrieval and data mining techniques. The knowledge maps created respectively from the documents of the teachers’ professional community, SCTNet, and the thesis repository at Taiwan’s National Central Library, are evaluated by experts of these two domains. Knowledge maps generated by the system are accepted by domain experts from the evaluation since the degree of their modification of the automatically created knowledge maps is proportionally small. The knowledge structure representing the categories of community documents maintains its high purity, diversity, specificity, and structure adaptation by using the knowledge map maintenance function with limited computational cost. Thus, the knowledge map creation and maintenance mechanisms developed in this research enable the dynamic knowledge management of communities of practice on the Internet.