Searching For Expertise in Social Networks: A Summary of Popular Systems

Seeking answers to questions always occurs in our learning and daily interactions. Before the computer era, we often got answers from acquaintances and books. Today, appear-ance of the Internet provides us with many new ways to gain answers such as searching web pages by using search engines,posting questions to forums or sending emails to friends. However, in many cases, seeking answers is still time-consuming. If all questions could be answered by a knowledgable person in real-time, it would be much more efficient. Fortunately, systems for fulfilling this need have been designed, that is "Expertise Location Engine". In this paper, we introduce and summarize three of them, and at-tempt to get some clues about what tradeoffs should be con-sidered while designing an expertise location engine