Approaches to locating expertise using corporate knowledge

In many organizations people need to locate colleagues with knowledge and information to resolve a problem. Computer-based systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly important to industrial organizations. In this paper we discuss the development of Expertise Finders suitable for use within the engineering design environment, as illustrated through the use of a scenario. A key feature of this work is that the Expertise Finder returns both recommended contacts and supporting documentation. The Expertise Finder bases its results on information held within the organization, e.g. on-line publications repositories, human resource records, and not on individually compiled Curriculum Vitaes or other forms of user-maintained records. The recommendations are presented to the user with due regard to the social context, and are supported by the documents used to make the recommendation. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. * Correspondence to: R. Crowder, IAM Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Contract/grant sponsor: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Contract/grant number: GR/M83582. information above that given by documents alone to resolve the issue. In this paper, the term expertise assumes the embodiment of knowledge and skills within individuals. This definition distinguishes expertise from an expert. An individual may have different levels of expertise about different topics. Expertise can be topical or procedural and is arranged and valued within the organization. In some cases, expertise can be captured from a person and used to populate a database. This works very well when the problem is restricted to a very specific domain, e.g. robot maintenance (Auriol et al., 1999). However, for many problems the required expertise can only be accessed through a social network. To solve a specific problem people want to find other people with the required expertise quickly. In many organizations, key personnel (managers, senior employees, information concierges; McDonald and Ackerman, 2000) will facilitate the contacts. Recommender systems are one approach to automate this process, by augmenting and assisting the natural expertiselocating behaviour within an organization. A