A Framework for the Construction of Ontology for ICT Experts

Abstract

Systems that help to find answers to suitable experts have received the attention of many researchers. Pioneer researchers on the development of search system for experts emphasized the importance of a search system that required returning a list prioritizing the names of individuals. Among the issues raised related to locating experts are, the critical problem of maintaining up-to-date information in the expert database and the inadequacy in expert finding systems in returning search results that are expected to account for not only the list of the names of the experts, but any information related to the experts and those involved with them. In the last decade, researchers have examined the search for experts from various research perspectives such as expert tracking system and construction of expert profiles involving ontology. This paper aims to describe a new approach in designing a framework for the construction of ontology that will be used in the directory of ICT experts. The researchers propose to incorporate thesaurus in their construction of ontology on ICT experts by providing a profile of the experts including their social profile and whatever concerns that may be associated with the expert. The researchers constructed the ontology on ICT experts by extracting information from sources such as their resumes and personal web sites to obtain the index glossary of words that characterized experts to be used in the directory of experts system. In this study, the standards contained in the Performance Evaluation System of the National University of Malaysia are used to extract information on the academicians in the Faculty of Information Science and Technology. The researchers employed the index glossary, metadata of experts and integrate appropriate taxonomy, thesaurus and classification schemes; such as Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) taxonomy, web classification schemes such as Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) to enrich the ontology of ICT expertise. The proposed framework aims at helping users find information on the expert they require and at the same time obtain other information related to the experts from various perspectives encompassing research, consultancy, links with research partners, other interest related to a particular field and other resources. With a semantically driven directory of ICT experts, matters related to ICT can be referred to the right experts. The framework will be validated by developing the directory of ICT experts prototype and by involving domain experts to evaluate the content of the ontology constructed. In addition, the researchers will evaluate the search results of users who will use the prototype to search for ICT experts.