Several applications support the adaptation of course material. Even though most of these systems allow to specify interaction preferences or even employ user modeling techniques, every system is an island with this respect. In particular, different systems cannot share user models or predict preferences in the absence of prior interactions. We use ideas from the theory of Communities of Practice to consolidate user models and to extend current approaches towards a CoP-sensitive adaptation.

The problem of information overload has been addressed by several systems. However, many approaches are limited to informal artifacts and need to refer to the user for reference on the quality or usefulness of retrieved information. We make use of semantic technologies, which facilitate the reification and extraction of scientific practice. Based on semantic differences and similarities of semantically marked up artifacts, we identify clusters of users with shared practice, i.e. virtual communities of practice.

We believe that mathematics is the language of science and has paved the way of many innovations. However, mathematical research is often said to be “non-practical” and “hard to digest”. Furthermore, experts have access to highly specialized results, but are often less aware of applications outside their own community.

We are implementing the interactive and collaborative reader panta rhei. While users are reading, rating, and discussing their online documents, implicit and explicit user modeling techniques are applied to personalize the adaptation of content. Displayed documents are read only, but authors can draw on the sTeX-2-OMDoc-2-XHTML workflow to write documents in their preferred LaTeX editor and publish their results in the web reader. During the conversion to XHTML semantic identifiers and metadata are preserved, which improves the web-accessibility of the imported documents.

panta rhei — everything grows. These two words where used by Plato to subsume the study of his colleague Heraklit, who argued that the world is a permanent becoming and vanishing, in which everything constantly changes. This also applies to the area of Web2.0, which revolutionized the WWW and transformed it into a more social, user friendly, emergent, and flexible network, in which users have become media producers and web applications became more open as well as social, while at the same time improving their mutual integration.

This works applies the economic theory of communities of practice to the area of science and scientific education. A document-centered view on COPs is taken, i.e. it is assumed that scientific practice is inscribed in the content, structure, and appearance of documents. However, scientific practice is also encoded in the meta view on these documents, i.e. the community's rating, discussions, and reviews of document. It is claimed that explicating and comparing both types of practice allows for identifying various scientific communities and sub-communities.