Expert Search is a tool that returns people rather than documents based on an assessment of document structure, key terms, identities, and 'best distances'. It can search millions of documents across enterprise intranets or the public web if the universe is predefined. The document demonstrates Expert Search by searching a universe of 'Famous Chemists' and provides results with supporting evidence that can open messaging clients if the person is online. It explains how different domains or universes can be built by uploading name lists with typical spreadsheet input and finding URLs for analysis to create custom Expert Search tools.

1. Expert Search for Learners & Educators Beyond “BuddyFinder” Marc Eisenstadt & Jianhan Zhu Knowledge Media Institute The Open University June 2007

3. Universe of “Famous Chemists”

5. Results with ‘supporting evidence’

6. Clicking on green bullet will open MSG Client in a new window IF anyone is online, clicking on green bullet will open MSG chat

7. Other ‘universes’ too! How do we build these?

8. Get a set of names from anywhere (National Academy of Scienes, etc.)

9. Upload the names

10. Typical spreadsheet input

11. First we determine the domain

12. Now we find some URLs

13. We ‘guess’ 20 URLs per name

16. Then we get ready to analyse each URL

17. This will create a custom Expert Search tool for our domain

21. Acknowledgements Expert Search architecture: Jianhan Zhu Google API and BuddyFinder integration: Chris Denham Graphics and site: Harriett Cornish, Damian Dadswell Project principal investigator: Marc Eisenstadt Expert Search is partly supported by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme of the 6th Framework Programme for RTD - project ELeGI, contract IST-002205. This software and its documentation do not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of the data and tools appearing herein. http://expertsearch.open.ac.uk/elegi