Formative work by Lave and Wenger has articulated how  practices  emerge through the interplay of informal processes with symbolic codifications and artifacts. In this paper, we describe how ontologies can serve as symbolic tools within a community of practice supporting communication and knowledge sharing. We show that when a community's perspective on an issue is stable, it opens the possibility for introducing knowledge services, based on an ontology co-constructed by knowledge engineers with stakeholders. Using a case study we describe our approach, ontology driven document enrichment, looking at how ontology construction and population can be supported by web based technologies.
['John Domingue', 'Enrico Motta', 'Simon Buckingham Shum', 'Maria Vargas-Vera', 'Yannis Kalfoglou', 'Nick Farnes']
Supporting ontology driven document enrichment within communities of practice