Using web 2.0 to locate expertise

Finding experts who can help solve a problem can be difficult and time-consuming. Manually-maintained expertise profiles are often out of date. Expertise recommendations based on private data such as e-mail are difficult to verify. Intranet social computing services such as web logs (blogs), social bookmarking, and people-tagging can aid in building implicit profiles for expertise search using data captured in informal knowledge management tools. This paper introduces a meta-search tool that searches for experts based on their blogs, bookmarks, and tags. Results are visualized according to recency, organization, and geographic location. A usability study showed that users are highly satisfied with the tool, and are significantly more satisfied with the tool than with their existing techniques for finding experts.

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