Expertise Localization from Informal Sources & Information Technologies
The knowledge creation, dissemination and sharing has been a focus of concern for organizations since the advent of knowledge society. They are especially experiencing two strategic problems. The former consists in determining which kinds of knowledge are crucial for their activity, while the latter is the iden- tification of their experts. Who are they ? What are their competencies and skills ?
The main difficulty of these questions lies in the time component : hot topics appear and disappear continuously and new expertises are created every day. This new ever-changing pace has invalidated the traditional approach consisting in manually reporting links between skills and people in grids. This approach is time consuming and costly. Besides, it is inflexible and generally the grids are not regularly updated.
Yet people are communicating on a daily basis about their competencies and skills, inside and outside the organization : feeding blogs, asking and answering questions in emails, taking part in meetings focused on specific topics...
This project aims specifically to automate the analysis of these informal sources in order to support the management (identification, mapping and search) of knowledge, skills and people (experts) in an organization. A collection of soft- ware components will be developped to tackle this challenge. In the conception of these tools, four topics are chiefly targeted :