Developing a Repository of Knowledge for virtual communities with semantic web technologies

Abstract

The appearance and continuous growth of virtual communities on the web imposes the challenge of coping with the large amount of information and knowledge these communities produce. The Semantic Web with its set of standards and technologies provides the basic means for implementing repositories of knowledge for virtual communities. However not every member of a virtual community knows these technologies and is ready to use them. We present an implementation of a repository of knowledge that follows the Resource Description Framework enabling a standard representation of knowledge in a community and providing the necessary functionality for members of the community to manage this repository introducing information and relating this information in a simple manner that also facilitates the interoperability with other repositories.