Expert finding systems and Ontologies in a university setting

Abstract: Expert finding systems (EFS) help organizations store and retrieve information about their experts who have the capability to perform specific tasks. However, the search process for the expertise information in many organizations sometimes gives inaccurate or outdated results, and the reason for that is mainly because of the static structure in which this information is stored, mostly in the form of databases. This static process of information storing and retrieving often requires constant human intervention to update the expertise information. Malmö University is one organization that uses a static database structure to store its expert information.By utilizing the inference power of ontologies, which considers the structure of classes and their relations, rather than joining several tables as in keyword searching, we can make the search for expert information a dynamic process rather than a static one, and thus, we can reduce the amount of human intervention and errors. Utilizing expert finding systems can also determine the level of expertise available in the organization. A good example of such organization is Malmö University, where EFS can help in identifying the shortages of expertise in a specific field of study.Therefore, we have made a case study about the expert finding system at Malmö University, where we have made interviews and discussed the expert finding search process. Then we explored the role of ontologies and how the Semantic Web (SW) technologies can be utilized to search for meaning, rather than keywords, to improve the quality of the query results for expert finding, and thus minimizing unwanted search results.Furthermore, we study the several types of commonly used ontology design patterns (ODPs), which are predefined models to solve recurrent problems in designing ontologies, and then we suggest a suitable ODP to be used in designing an expert finding ontology (EFO) in a university setting. Then we select the content ontology design pattern, and we used it to design an EFO suitable for a university.