Case Sharing and Ontology Structuring in an Online Oral Medicine Community

The Swedish Oral Medicine Web (SOMWeb) is an online system built to support knowledge sharing among oral medicine practitioners who hold monthly telephone conferences to discuss difficult and interesting cases. Semantic Web technologies are used to model the templates used for case entry, the ontology of values used in filling in cases, and community data. To study the practitioners’ use and perceptions of the collaboration and the SOMWeb system, we have used observations of teleconferences, interviews with participants, and an online questionnaire. These are analyzed to provide an understanding of the participants’ opinions about the structured case entry and why they do or do not contribute. This is followed by a discussion on future work where the value ontology is made available for community editing and structuring, and incentives for user contributions to this process.