An ontological model for managing professional expertise

Abstract

A precise description of user skills is important in order to assign each particular task to suitable employees in organizations. In this paper, an ontological model for managing expertise is described. This model offers a formal definition of expertise through an ontology based on UNESCO nomenclature together with other semantic relationships and keywords designed specifically for the expert recommendation task. User’s expertise is represented in our ontological model by means of Expertise Lines. An Expertise Line is a combination of formally conceptualized knowledge terms and keywords that allow increase expressiveness using natural language. The ontological model has been integrated in an application infrastructure that provides several functionalities to manage expertise and to facilitate the definition of the expertise-based retrieval processes. The application infrastructure has been validated in expert finding tasks in order to provide suitable experts for evaluating research projects.

Keywords:

• expertise management
• expert recommendation systems
• ontology
• UNESCO nomenclature
• knowledge based systems

Notes

1 In this paper Expert Finding, Expert Recommender and Expert Seeking are considered synonyms, due to all of them respond to the same scope.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juana María Ruiz-Martínez

About the Author

Juana María Ruiz-Martínez received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish Philology (2004), and a bachelor’s degree (2006) and Master degree in Information Sciences (2009) all of them from the University of Murcia, Spain. She also received her Ph.D. degree in Information Science in 2012 from the University of Murcia and Valencia, which awarded her the special doctoral prize. Her research interests include ontology population from natural language text and knowledge classification.

José Antonio Miñarro-Giménez completed a bachelor's degree in Computer Science (2001 -- 2006) at the University of Murcia. He also received Master degree (2009) and the European Ph.D. degree (2012) from the University of Murcia. After he obtained his Ph.D. degree he worked as Postdoc at CeMSIIS, Medical University of Vienna. Currently, he is working at IMI, Medical University of Graz. He was awarded for the BMF acts project by FWF Austria Science Funds.

Rodrigo Martínez-Béjar has an academic background in Computer Science, Political Sciences and Sociology. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Murcia, Spain, where he is a Professor. He is a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His research interests include Artificial Intelligence and the Web. He has been the leader of many national and international research projects and co-author of more than 100 articles published in international journals and conferences.