Building Bottom-up Ontologies for Communities of Practice in High-tech Firms

In high-technology environments, where New Product Development (NPD) is an essential activity, providing effective decision support by making knowledge about development efforts readily available and accessible can contribute to the survival and growth of organizations. Often, the lack of a shared understanding leads to poor communication between people; moreover the coexistence of different software applications, languages and practices in people documentation efforts makes it hard to manage and exploit firm’s knowledge base. This paper identifies in Community of Practice (CoP) and Ontology a possible successful solution to these problems. The bottom-up approach proves to be suitable to ontology building for a CoP. Taking into account the characteristics of the context, a methodology for building bottomup ontologies for CoPs is proposed.