A Feasibility Study of an Approach to Extend Research Footprints

Funding agencies and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have been promoting the importance of interdisciplinary research (IDR). Supporting team-based IDR requires the ability to discover the expertise needed to solve complex problems. Many universities have adopted expertise systems, which includes the presentation of keywords or concepts to identify experts. The efforts at University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) have focused on building “communities of practice” that support diverse faculty who have an affinity for a particular topic and facilitate the ability to identify researchers with diverse expertise, knowledge, and skills who can contribute to new initiatives on campus. Our premise is that the university can facilitate the identification of potential contributors to communities of practice by correlating their associated ontologies to the concepts associated with researchers’ publications and proposal submissions. This paper presents the results of a preliminary study to examine the feasibility of the approach.