Expert Search for Learners & EducatorsBeyond “BuddyFinder”

Marc Eisenstadt & Jianhan ZhuKnowledge Media Institute

The Open UniversityJune 2007

Expert Search

• Returns people rather than documents• Winner TREC2006 competition against 23

rivals!• Assesses document structure, key terms,

identities, ‘best distances’• Massively scaleable for millions of documents• Ideal for enterprise/intranet search• Also works for ‘The Web’ if we can ‘delimit the

universe’ somehow beforehand

Universe of “Famous Chemists”

Universe of “Famous Chemists”

Results with ‘supporting evidence’

Results with ‘supporting evidence’

Clicking on green bullet will open MSG Client in a new window

Clicking on green bullet will open MSG Client in a new window

IF anyone is online, clicking on green bullet will open MSG chat

IF anyone is online, clicking on green bullet will open MSG chat

Other ‘universes’ too!How do we build these?Other ‘universes’ too!

How do we build these?

Get a set of names from anywhere (National Academy of

Scienes, etc.)

Get a set of names from anywhere (National Academy of

Scienes, etc.)

Upload the namesUpload the names

Typical spreadsheet inputTypical spreadsheet input

First we determine the domainFirst we determine the domain

Now we find some URLsNow we find some URLs

We ‘guess’ 20 URLs per nameWe ‘guess’ 20 URLs per name

Then we get ready to analyse each URL

Then we get ready to analyse each URL

This will create a custom Expert Search tool for our domain

This will create a custom Expert Search tool for our domain

Acknowledgements

Expert Search architecture: Jianhan ZhuGoogle API and BuddyFinder integration: Chris DenhamGraphics and site: Harriett Cornish, Damian DadswellProject principal investigator: Marc Eisenstadt

Expert Search is partly supported by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme of the 6th Framework Programme for RTD - project ELeGI, contract IST-002205. This software and its documentation do not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of the data and tools appearing herein.

http://expertsearch.open.ac.uk/elegi