A community-based expert finding system
Florian Metze, Christian Bauckhage, Tansu Alpcan · 2007
This paper proposes a system to facilitate exchange of information by automatically finding experts, competent in answering a given question. Our objective is to provide an online tool, which enables individuals within a potentially large organization to search for experts in a certain area, which may not be represented in company organization or reporting lines. The advantage of the proposed system over standard forums or other group-ware systems is that fullformatted questions can automatically be compared with stored qualification profiles, which were automatically derived from documents and possibly refined manually. This allows to find competent colleagues (or helpful literature such as how-tos) for a given problem in a single step, and without intermediate iterations. The system is symmetric in that it does not distinguish between “questioners ” (asking questions) and “experts ” (answering them), therefore forming a “community ” of users, which are distributed over an ontology covering the total knowledge. This ontology can either be given (i.e. in the form of an organizational chart), or it can be derived from the experts ’ knowledge. 1.