Context-Aware And Ontology-Driven Knowledge Sharing In P2p Communities

The knowledge management portfolio includes knowledge sharing as a means to connect knowledge to knowledge and knowledge to actors to support decision making, problem solving, viewpoint resolution, conflict negotiation, education and innovation. A knowledge sharing activity comprises two elements—(i) the content of the knowledge being shared and (ii) the context within which the knowledge is being shared. The context in which knowledge is sought and shared amongst peers is of significant importance in establishing the relevance and applicability of the knowledge content. In this paper we present a context-aware, ontology-driven knowledge-sharing framework that leverages ontology to both describe the knowledge sharing actors and the knowledge being shared. We model knowledge sharing in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Our P2P knowledge sharing framework comprises: (a) a domain ontology that is used to semantically model each peer; each peer is described as an instantiation of the ontology, (b) a weighted structural graph-based approach to establish affinity between peers and their contexts for the purpose of sharing relevant, needed knowledge resources, and (c) a task-feature relevance matrix to model the domain tasks influencing contextual affinity determination.