Graphical Representations of Message Exchange in Online Collaborative Environments: Uncovering Implicit Knowledge

Communication in online collaborative environments such as communities of practice, discussion lists, or institutional e-mail repositories hide information and knowledge that is imperceptible to the individual, despite the effort made in the storage of messages. This paper presents and ongoing work on the graphical representation of aspects of communication in online collaborative environments, aimed at uncovering the implicit knowledge hidden in the archived messages. We review the literature on graphical representation of information in online collaborative environments, followed by a pilot study on the extraction and filtering of messages of a community of practice, with rules for the graphical representation of frequent terms used in the messages and of the evolution of those frequencies in time. The graphical representation allows for the understanding of qualitative aspects of communication, such as the identification of hot topics and trends, and the forming of social networks among the participants.