A Document Reuse Tool for Communities of Practice

Virtual communities of practice are gaining importance as mean of sharing and exchanging knowledge. In such environments, information reuse is of major concern. In this paper, we outline the importance of structuring documents in order to facilitate the reuse of their content. We show how explicit structure representation facilitates the understanding of the original documents and helps considerably in automating the reuse process. We propose two main tools: the first performs automatic structure transformation using matching techniques and the second performs structure and instances evolution in a transparent and an automatic manner.