Use it or lose it

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to apply the concept of organizational memory to a community of practice, and consider the tools available to an e‐community engaged in the creation of online learning systems.Design/methodology/approachThe paper explains how knowledge, task and domain ontologies can be combined to provide a structure that communities of practice can use to share both tacit and explicit knowledge.FindingsIf you look up “ontology” in Wikipedia, it says that “in information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts”. Having knowledge set in context in a usable, accessible form – knowledge capitalization – is a key source of value creation for organizations. One of the main reasons for trying to make organizational knowledge explicit – particularly tacit knowledge – is to allow the organization to see what it does not know and where the gaps are. Ontologies can provide the technological backbone and help create a “semantic learning organization”.Practical implicationsThe paper discusses the application of this approach to a community of practice of e‐learning engaged in instructional engineering. It shows how this facilitates the development of a semantic learning organization. It also highlights the focus on generative or “double‐loop” learning in communities of practice.Originality/valueThe paper shows how the concept of organizational memory and the tools of knowledge management can be applied in virtual communities.