Looking for experts? What can linked data do for you?

Abstract

Expert search and profiling systems aim to identify candidate experts and rank them with respect to their estimated expertise on a given topic, using available evidence. Traditional expert search and profiling systems exploit structured data from closed systems (e.g. email program) or unstructured data from open systems (e.g. the Web). However, on today's Web, there is a growing number of data sets published according to the Linked Data principals, the majority of them being part of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. As LOD connects data and people across different platforms in a meaningful way, one can assume that expert search and profiling systems would benefit from harnessing LOD. The work presented in this paper sets out to prove this assumption and to explore potential benefits and drawbacks of using the LOD cloud as expertise evidence source. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the feasibility of existing expert search and profiling approaches on a recent snapshot of the LOD cloud. Our findings indicate that LOD cloud is already a useful source for some kinds of expert search approaches (e.g., those based on publications and professional events) but still has to meet certain requirements in order to reach its full potential.