Actor Model and Knowledge Management Systems: Social Interaction as a Framework for Knowledge Integration

Expertise locator systems (ELS) are a special type of knowledge management systems that are used to help locate intellectual capital. The searchable answer-generating environment (SAGE) is an expertise locator system that was developed to identify experts in the state of Florida. This presentation describes an application of the actor model of computation to the development of expertise locator systems (ELS). The actor model describes an approach to modeling intelligence in terms of a society of communicating knowledge-based problem experts where each expert may in turn be viewed as a society of primitive actors. A conceptual implementation for SAGE, and ELS in general, based on the actor model as a design paradigm is described. Practical applications for an actor-model based ELS are also discussed.