Being Omnipresent To Be Almighty: The Importance of the Global Web Evidence for Organizational Expert Finding

Modern expert finding algorithms are developed under the assumption that all possible expertise evidence for a person is concentrated in a company that currently employs the person. The evidence that can be acquired outside of an enterprise is traditionally unnoticed. At the same time, the Web is full of personal information which is sufficiently detailed to judge about a person’s skills and knowledge. In this work, we review various sources of expertise evidence outside of an organization and experiment with rankings built on the data acquired from six different sources, accessible through APIs of two major web search engines. We show that these rankings and their combinations are often more realistic and of higher quality than rankings built on organizational data only.