Welcome to the ExpertFinder Initiative!

A collaborative initiative that aims (1) to devise vocabularies, rule extensions (e.g., for FOAF and SIOC) and best practices for the annotation of personal homepages, web pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, and (2) to provide adequate metadata to enable computer agents to find experts on particular topics. The main goal of ExpertFinder is to enable a Web-scale infrastructure for the creation, publication and use of experts’ semantic descriptions to support various scenarios including: group management; disaster response; recruitment; team building; problem solving and on-the-fly consultation.

This page is dedicated to starting the ExpertFinder subproject of FOAF on devising vocabulary extensions and best practices to annotate not only personal home pages, but also pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate metadata to find experts on particular topics.

A mailinglist has been set up for enhancing collaboration: if you are interested in joining this effort, please check out the expertfinder-dev mailinglist!

The use cases for this initiative reach from scientific communities (annotation of research institutes, finding experts/reviewers for a certain area) to industrial (human resources, company and job profiles), creating CVs, etc.

For the widely adopted use of such vocabulary extensions we identify the following main goals:

  1. An Extended vocabulary based on RDF FOAF: to describe persons, institutions, enterprises, publications, events, projects, areas of expertise and interests...
  2. Best Practices: on how to publish the related metadata in order to enable automatic processing.
  3. Rules and Other Enabling Technologies: The possibility to add rules to metadata to express implicit, interlinked metadata. Support implementations of ExpertFinder applications.
  4. Use Cases: Identify practical real world use cases and devise enabling technologies and applications to demonstrate the benefits of publishing and combining metadata using common vocabularies.

Members of the ExpertFinder initiative are listed here.

The initial version of this page was provided by AxelPolleres.

Submitted by johnbreslin on Tue, 2007-12-11 16:13. categories [ ]