Using the Web to Construct Taxonomy for a Heterogeneous Community of Practice

A heterogeneous community of practice spans many disciplines, industries and professions. Members of these communities are united by common research, products and experiences but are frequently separated by specialized vocabulary and industry terms. This lack of language commonality presents a challenge to efficiently locating relevant Web based information which usually depends on the user's knowledge of the field and ability to select suitable terms to formulate a search query. Research and practice have shown that the quality of information retrieval is significantly improved when taxonomy is employed to organize terms that describe the search domain. This paper presents an innovative, collaborative approach to building taxonomy for a particular domain, populating it with Web content and sharing it among members of the community of practice. A model is built and results and implications are discussed