BUILDING COLLABORATIVE KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS: A WEB ENGINEERING APPROACH George Gkotsis CTI, E-Learning Sector 26500 Rio-Patras, Greece gkotsis@cti.gr Christina E. Evangelou CTI, E-Learning Sector 26500 Rio-Patras, Greece chriseva@cti.gr Nikos Karacapilidis Industrial Management and Information Systems Lab, MEAD University of Patras, 26500 Rio-Patras, Greece nikos@mech.upatras.gr Manolis Tzagarakis CTI, E-Learning Sector 26500 Rio-Patras, Greece tzagara@cti.gr ABSTRACT Knowledge Based Systems (KBSs) has been a research and practice area of growing interest for more than a decade. After an initial success, the lack of sophisticated methodologies or theories for the transformation of domain knowledge in a form that is utilizable by a computer-based application, in addition to serious difficulties such as the low reusability of their components due to requirements imposed by diverse knowledge domains and groups, made the reconsideration of the KBSs development process appearing as a prominent need. On the other hand, Web Engineering is an emerging discipline that aims at the deployment of tools, techniques and methodologies to support the development of web applica- tions. Taking the above remarks into account, this paper proposes a framework of practices for the development of col- laborative KBSs that comply with it. The proposed framework deploys a series of tools and methodologies to support the development of the above applications during their whole life cycle, striving for openness, scalability and cross-platform compatibility. Much attention is also paid to issues related to requirements analysis and services specification with re- spect to a CoP’s practices, the applications’ architecture, and the related ontologies building. KEYWORDS Knowledge Management, Web Engineering, Communities of Practice. 1. INTRODUCTION Experiences reported by an increasing number of companies show that their long-term survival and competi- tive success is determined not so much by their financial muscles and size, but by the manner in which they consciously attempt to learn, create, codify, and utilise knowledge. Consequently, a variety of computer-based frameworks, widely known as Knowledge-Based Systems (KBSs), have emerged in order to deal with the acquisition, storage and intelligent processing of the employees’ knowledge, as well as with the process of making this knowledge accessible to their peers for the facilitation of diverse organizational activities [1]. According to the related literature, the most efficient involvement of humans in knowledge sharing activities