Section: Application Domains

E-learning, Collaborative Knowledge Building

Collaborative knowledge building process is a distributed social process  [64] . During this process, Knowledge is built by a constellation of communities, each community being a node in the knowledge building network. Each node in the network is autonomous and has its own knowledge that can be exchanged and negotiate with other communities. A peer-to-peer architecture is more compatible with social architecture of knowledge building processes  [65] . In addition, knowledge is basically created by individuals involved in social process  [61] . Therefore, it is fundamental to support personal knowledge building in a collaborative knowledge building environment.

We develop distributed semantic wikis (cf section  6.2.5 and section  5.5 ) for collaborative knowledge building. These environments support the distributed social process of knowledge building and support personal knowledge building.