About
It was widely accepted that learning did not end with the completion of formal education. Much lifelong learning was supported not by textbooks or formal training programs, but through community membership. Learning about a topic became synonymous with becoming part of a community of experts in that field. These communities ranged from workplace groups sharing ideas to hobbyists with common interests. Increasingly, these communities were learning and sharing ideas online, creating and sharing messages and documents that could serve as valuable learning resources for new and existing members. However, finding appropriate content from a large and growing resource, such as by using text search engines, was often inefficient or fruitless.
A number of knowledge technologies were available to address this issue, many of which involved annotating documents according to formal representations or ontologies of the community’s knowledge and interests. These approaches faced challenges when the document turnover required more maintenance than the community could provide. Maintaining a knowledge base required effort and cost, and in corporate settings, the knowledge in documents had a limited life span to recoup the investment, especially in fast-moving topics. In non-corporate communities, where contributions were often voluntary, maintaining such systems became even more challenging.
The goal was to address the issue of fast-moving information by leveraging the characteristics of the community that generated and used the resource. The idea was that each community had unique characteristics, such as communicative genres, which could be used to develop low-maintenance tools for more accurate search and retrieval of community artefacts. The hypothesis was that the community’s perspective on what was important would be reflected in the implicit structures of the artefacts they created and shared. The approach adapted existing tools and methodologies, including heuristic analysis, knowledge modelling, and latent semantic indexing.
