Mining Knowledge Sharing Processes in Online Discussion Forums

Online discussion forums have become a popular knowledge source for sharing information or solving problems. This study is an attempt to apply business process modeling and mining techniques to analyzing online knowledge sharing activities. Traditional process mining techniques have little consideration on social interactions, which are rich in online forums. We propose to complement traditional process mining with analyses on social interactions among discussion participants. Our experiments show that business process modeling and mining techniques can be used to model online knowledge sharing processes and identify patterns related to effective knowledge sharing. In addition, analyses on social interactions provide insights that verify and supplement the process mining results.