Collaboration Patterns in a Medical Community of Practice ⋆ G¨ oran Falkman 1 , Marie Gustafsson 1, 2 , Olof Torgersson 2 , and Mats Jontell 3 1 School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Sk¨ovde, SE-541 28 Sk¨ovde, Sweden {goran.falkman,marie.gustafsson}@his.se 2 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology/G¨ oteborg University, SE-412 96 G¨ oteborg, Sweden {mariegus,oloft}@chalmers.se 3 Institute of Ontology, Sahlgrenska Academy, G¨ oteborg University, P.O. Box 450, SE-405 30 G¨oteborg, Sweden Mats.Jontell@odontologi.gu.se 1 Introduction Since the mid 1990’s, the Swedish Oral Medicine Network (SOMNet) has pro- moted the harmonization and dissemination of knowledge and the sharing of clinical experience within oral medicine. Its members are located throughout Sweden and are mainly dentists with a professional interest in oral medicine. SOMNet holds monthly teleconference meetings focused on case consultations. An assigned chairperson leads the meeting, guides case presentations, sums up discussions, and records decisions made. When presenting a case, the presenter “tells the story” of his/her encounters with the patient and reports on treatments tried and results achieved so far. Then, the other participants ask questions of clarification and start suggesting possible diagnosis and treatments. Similar cases or general treatment strategies will sometimes accompany the suggestions. SOMWeb is an online system supporting SOMNet’s activities by providing facilities for adding and administering cases to be discussed at SOMNet meetings; browsing cases, meetings, and members of the system; looking at presentations of individual cases and meetings; administering meetings; and reading news. As described in previous work [1], community aspects (e.g., users, meetings, cases, and templates) of SOMWeb are modeled in OWL and data is stored as RDF. The SOMWeb system was introduced in May 2006 and by April 2008, SOMWeb has 90 users, 89 cases have been added, and 20 meetings have utilized SOMWeb. In our previous research, we have studied clinicians’ use of SOMWeb [3] as well as the possibility of using ideas from the Pragmatic Web [4] to describe com- munications patterns within the community [5]. In this paper, we continue this research by presenting ideas on how collaboration patterns within the domain can be identified, modeled, and be put into use. ⋆ This work is funded by the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (VINNOVA), research grant 2006-02792.