Recommending expertise in an organizational setting
David W. McDonald · 1999
This work explores how information systems can be augmented to assist users in finding other individuals who are likely to have specialized, expert information that they need. This paper describes a field study that considers the social and cognitive mechanisms that people use to find candidate sources of expertise. These mechanisms are the basis for a recommender system that can help users find expertise. Keywords Expertise, qualitative research, field study, system design, recommender system, computer supported cooperative work INTRODUCTION Expertise is a valuable organizational resource. Attempts to capture expertise in documents or information systems (e.g. organizational memories, FAQs and databases) often result in gaps and inconsistencies. Expertise is difficult to represent in an explicit form and information systems are only as good as the information they contain. Systems that make suggestions without an explicit representation of the content are one possible solution thi...