Collaborative Knowledge Visualization for Cross-Community Learning

Knowledge exchange between heterogeneous communities of practice has been recognized as the critical source of innovation and creation of new knowledge. This paper considers the problem of enabling such cross community knowledge exchange through knowledge visualization. We discuss the social nature of knowledge construction and describe main requirements for practical solutions to the given problem, as well as existing approaches. Based on this analysis, we propose a model for collaborative elicitation and visualization of community knowledge perspectives based on the construction of personalised learning knowledge maps and shared concept networks that incorporate implicit knowledge and personal views of individual users. We show how this model supports explicit and implicit exchange of knowledge between the members of different communities and present its prototypical realization in the Knowledge Explorer, an interactive tool for collaborative visualization and cross-community sharing of knowledge. Concrete application scenarios and evaluation experiences are discussed on the example of the Internet platform