P@NOPTIC Expert: Searching for Experts not just for Documents

Nick Craswell, David Hawking, Anne-Marie Vercoustre,Peter Wilkins


Keywords

Web Search, Expert Search, Expertise, Corporate Memory

Abstract

In large organisations, particularly those spread over multiple offices, undergoing organisational change or experiencing high staff turnover, it can be difficult to keep track of employee expertise. People search for documents to find people and search for people to get documents and to get information quickly.
P@NOPTIC Expert is a Web based system which automatically identifies experts in an area, based on the documents already published on an organisation's intranet. The system can be queried like a standard Web search engine, but instead of returning documents it returns a list of experts. Each expert listing includes contact details and supporting evidence.
P@NOPTIC Expert provides automatic and rapid identification of experts:

Decisions are based on the documents that staff load onto the corporate Intranet; this automatically tracks expertise as staff develop.
The prototype shows the benefit of integrating Web data with structured data (a list all of employees) to deliver more valuable corporate information.


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