Combining Evidences from Web Pages and Corporate Data

The main source of competitive advantage of an organization is its knowledge assets and its learning capacity. We argue that finding knowledge in an organization is not just about finding documents, it is also about finding the right person. In this paper we present PeopleFinder, a Web based system which automatically identifies experts in an area, based on the documents already published on an organization's intranet or part of the corporate data. The system can be queried like a standard Web search engine, but instead of returning documents it returns a list of experts. Each expert listing includes contact details and supporting evidence. The prototype leverages on organizational data, such the project descriptions and membership to infer which documents can be used as best evidences of expertise. The paper also includes preliminary evaluation