An Agent Based Approach to Finding Expertise

摘要

In many organisations 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 organizations and scientific communities. In this paper we discuss the development of an agent based expertise finder (EF) suitable for use within an academic research environment. A key feature of this work is that the EF returns both recommended contacts and supporting documentation. The EF bases its results on information held within the organisation, for example publications, human resource records and not on CVs or 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. The technology used allows the development of distributed, interchangeable agents that use real time data to find expertise. It is our intention to use this approach within manufacturing and other knowledge intensive organisations.