Description: |
Web-based online communities like blogs, forums, scientific communities etc. have become important places for people to
seek and share expertise. Existing search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Live etc. are not yet capable to answer queries
that require deep semantic understanding of the query or the document. Instead, it is preferable to find and ask someone
who has related expertise or experience on a topic and these online communities are the places for people to seek
advice or help. But before such analysis can be done, we need to gather the data (questions and answers, social support
or discussion, comments or advice, content rating, social relations etc) that describes these online communities. There
is no universal standard data structure for the outline of user participation in these communities. Also as these
communities rarely interoperate, each is typically only aware of its own social data and cannot benefit from other
communities data. Thus extracting, aggregating and analyzing data from these communities for finding experts on a single
framework is a challenging task. In this draft, we present a Grid-enabled framework of expertise search (GREFES) engine
which utilizes online communities as sources for experts on various topics. This draft suggest an open data structure
called SNML (Social Network Markup Language) to outline user participation in online communities. The architecture
addresses major challenges in crawling of community data and query processing by utilizing the computational power and
high bandwidth inherently available in the Grid. Besides, our framework supports open APIs for third party providers or
developers to build new solutions so that we can get more user feedback to improve the system. |