title: Leveraging medical taxonomies to improve knowledge management within online communities of practice: The knowledge maps system.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Online communities of practice contain a wealth of information, stored in the free text of shared communications between community members. The Knowledge Maps (KMaps) system is designed to facilitate Knowledge Translation in online communities through multi-level analyses of the shared messages of these communications.
  
  
  METHODS
  Using state-of-the-art semantic mapping technologies (Metamap) the contents of the messages shared within an online community are mapped to terms from the MeSH medical lexicon, providing a multi-level topic-specific summary of the knowledge being shared within the community. Using the inherent hierarchical structure of the lexicon important insights can be found within the community.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The KMaps system was applied to two medical mailing lists, the PPML (archives from 2009-02 to 2013-02) and SURGINET (archives from 2012-01 to 2013-04), identifying 27,924 and 50,597 medical terms respectively. KMaps identified content areas where both communities found interest, specifically around Diseases, 22% and 24% of the total terms, while also identifying field-specific areas that were more popular: SURGINET expressed an interest in Anatomy (14% vs 4%) while the PPML was more interested in Drugs (19% vs 9%). At the level of the individual KMaps identified 6 PPML users and 9 SURGINET users that had noticeably more contributions to the community than their peers, and investigated their personal areas of interest.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The KMaps system provides valuable insights into the structure of both communities, identifying topics of interest/shared content areas and defining content-profiles for individual community members. The system provides a valuable addition to the online KT process.
authors.affiliation: Medical Informatics, Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, Canada. Electronic address: sam.stewart@dal.ca.
authors.forename: Samuel Alan
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Stewart
authors.affiliation: NICHE Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
authors.forename: Syed Sibte Raza
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Abidi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003142:Communication; D006282:Health Personnel; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D058436:Knowledge Management; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D008511:Medicine; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010146:Pain; D010372:Pediatrics; D012660:Semantics; D012984:Software; D066231:Surgeons; D057170:Translational Research, Biomedical / Q000379:methods*
keywords: Knowledge management; Medical taxonomies; Natural language processing; Online communities; Semantic mapping