Finding appropriate persons to consult with is always difficult in reality. This thesis focuses on this issue based on the use of technical papers as an expertise indicator source. We first review and analyse the existing systems in this domain. Then we present two approaches to tackle the problem. The first approach incorporates information retrieval techniques for expertise location. We also use referral information (relation ontology) to get more meaningful results, which might be hidden or overlooked, since personal contacts play an important role in the real world. In the second approach, we use pre-defined categories to categorize the experts into these categories to facilitate the user to locate experts from the categories. A prototype of our system has been implemented and resul...[ Read more ]

Finding appropriate persons to consult with is always difficult in reality. This thesis focuses on this issue based on the use of technical papers as an expertise indicator source. We first review and analyse the existing systems in this domain. Then we present two approaches to tackle the problem. The first approach incorporates information retrieval techniques for expertise location. We also use referral information (relation ontology) to get more meaningful results, which might be hidden or overlooked, since personal contacts play an important role in the real world. In the second approach, we use pre-defined categories to categorize the experts into these categories to facilitate the user to locate experts from the categories. A prototype of our system has been implemented and results of its use are presented.