Kicking off the week with a technical poster from Michigan University called "SISN: A Toolkit for Augmenting Expertise Sharing via Social Networks".
They're developing a toolkit to support expertise sharing via social networks. The toolkit "SISN" (Seeking Information via Social Networks) is "is a general purpose toolkit for social network-based information sharing applications that combines techniques in information retrieval, social network, and peer-to-peer system".
Their toolkit requires:
• A collection of users with their expertise being represented by their profiles
• A social network that connects the users and place them along the query/referral/answer pipeline
• A collection of searching strategies to spread the query/referral efficiently across different user groups
• A coupling of the system with daily communication channels (e.g. IM and
Email) to provide a convenient interface between the major parties involved in the information seeking process
The system consists of:
- Information profiling
- An index
- Categorizer
- Social network module
- Social network module
- Profile Promoter and Peer Profile Learner
"We believe that, by providing a general-purpose toolkit as a platform for sharing and seeking expertise via social networks, the current work helps us advance towards narrowing the gap between the social and technical perspectives of social network-based information seeking, i.e. the gap “between what we have to do socially and what computer science as a field knows how to do technically”.
I think that this would lead to a whole new rush to optimise yourself so that you show up in the experts for your chosen subject area.
Unfortunately as far as I can tell they haven't made it freely available to us as yet which is a shame, but I'll watch that space.
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