Building Expertise Network by
Tagging People
Yan Qu
Jun Zhang
iSchool, University of Maryland
Yanqu@umd.edu
Pitney Bowes, Inc.
Jun.Zhang@pb.com
Where are the Experts in
Organizations and Communities?

How can I find expert to ask questions or to
collaborate?

What types of expertise do we have?

Do we know each other’s expertise?

What do other people think I am good at?

What I want other people to know me about?
How about an Expertise
Knowledge-Base

An Expertise Knowledge-Base
Who knows what?
 How can I contact the experts?


The Desiderata
Up to Date
Complete
Accurate
…
How about an Expertise
Knowledge-Base

Many ways of building Expertise KnowledgeBase





HR collects employee’s profile
Mining people’s webpages
Let people report their own expertise
Let people report other’s expertise
Can they provide complete, accurate, and upto-date Expertise Knowledge-Base?
People Tagging + “Game”

A new way to identify and find expertise
in an organization or a local community
People tagging
 “Game with a purpose”
 Expertise network visualization & analysis

Tag your colleagues
Explore the expertise network
Search expertise
Request for experts
Pilot Study
•
Deployed the system in a research unit at a
large corporation, and two course sections at
the University of Maryland
Within 3 Weeks…
# People
The
UMcorporation Course1
90
62
UMCourse2
25
# Registered 53
User
# Tags
2306
62
25
1705
367
# Tagger
41
46
13
# Being
tagged
67
57
11
Making Sense of Organizational Expertise
Making Sense of Organizational Expertise
Information Science and Technology (682)
Science and Technology
Computer Science and Technology (123)
Other (144)
Movies/Books/Music/Web Media (207)
Sport and Recreation
Food and Restaurant (61)
Sport (68)
Topical Classification
Other (164)
Geographic Location (181)
Community and Organization (192)
Job and Title (53)
Other (188)
Making Sense of Organizational Expertise
Lessons Learned

Incentive for participation

Getting started

Knowledge structure underlying the tags

Social psychology

Privacy & Security
Take Home Points

People Tagging is an effective way of building
organizational expertise knowledge-base

Many design challenges

Need advanced systems supporting the Sensemaking
of large expertise knowledge- base
Thanks!
Yan Qu
yanqu@umd.edu