Panoptic Expert: Searching for experts not just for documents

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. 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. The prototype shows the benefit of integrating Web data with structured data (a list all of employees) to deliver more valuable corporate information.