Explaining for sharing context in communities

A community emerges from a social network because a group of persons have a joint focus on a common problem to solve. The common problem solving supposes that, beyond the joint focus, the group develop a shared context for a better coordination and collaboration. The shared context is the expression of the compromise reach by participants in order to make compatible their mental representations of the problem solving. An important means to build this shared context in a community is explanation. In this paper, we show that relevant explanations require a formalism allowing a uniform representation of knowledge, of reasoning and of context.