Ontology-Based Expertise Matching System Within Academia

The knowledge and expertise of researchers and professors is the major asset that universities hold. In order to make use of this asset, it is necessary to share expertise between staff as well as transfer expertise to industry. Expertise matching - locating experts with the specific expertise is receiving more and more attention since it facilitates people connection to each other. This paper proposes an ontology-based approach for expertise matching within an academic research environment. In our approach an expert ontology is used to integrate multiple expertise indications from heterogeneous data sources and domain ontology is used to replace keyword-based expertise profile to concept based expertise profile. An analysis of the prototype system indicates that ontology-based expertise matching supports users browsing and searching expertise more efficiently and effectively.