Collective Cognitive Authority: Expertise Location via Social Labeling

The problem of knowing who knows what is multifaceted. Knowledge and expertise lie on a spectrum and one’s expertise in one topic area may have little bearing on one’s knowledge in a disparate topic area. In addition, we continue to learn new things over time. Each of us see but a sliver of our acquaintances’ and co-workers’ areas of expertise. By making explicit and visible many individual perceptions of cognitive authority, this work shows that a group can know what its members know about in a relatively efficient and inexpensive manner.