Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to define a community memory for a virtual communities of practice (CoP) based on organizational learning (OL) concept and ontologies. Design/methodology/approach: The paper focuses on applying the OL concept to virtual CoP and proposes a framework for building the CoP memory by identifying several layers of ontologies such as generic, knowledge, domain, and task ontologies. A CoP of e-learning is used as an example of semantic learning organization and as an application for the proposed framework. Findings: Applying the proposed framework on the CoP of e-learning and more specifically in the instructional engineering domain shows that community knowledge can be reified and shared among the members. This framework can be used as a backbone for other CoP in other fields. Originality/value: This present work proposed a general framework for the CoP memory using a knowledge engineering approach and proposing different forms of ontologies as a backbone for the memory. It also suggests that the knowledge capitalization is important as well as the contextual element. (Contains 5 figures and 4 notes.)