Abstract
The paramount importance of the creation, sharing, and dissemination of knowledge in our present day knowledge based societies is unprecedented. The maximization of sharing and transferring useful knowledge has become a formidable challenge that needs more investigation. This can be facilitated by attaining a better understanding of how knowledge is created, shared and managed, in addition to investigating how knowledge-centred communities emerge. This research investigates whether computers can detect the relations between language, knowledge and community through monitoring the emergence of a knowledge community. A corpus based linguistic method was adapted to investigate the trace of knowledge transferred through texts written by and to different stakeholders in the community in order to monitor the emergence of a multidisciplinary community of practice in a particular domain. The method was based on theories related to the tendency of each knowledge community to develop and appropriate communal and specialized lexicons. It combined the use of univariate and multivariate analytical techniques in order to detect, to a high degree of reliability, the emergence of new knowledge communities and the diffusion of knowledge across community members. This led to a novel approach in the computerized observance and analysis of the emergence of knowledge communities based on how language shapes a community at the same time as a community shapes the language. It also led to proposing the information Spider Model; a document repository system designed for facilitating sharing knowledge through text among a community's members.