Expert Finding for eCollaboration Using FOAF with RuleML Rules

Web-based collaboration (eCollaboration) is becoming increasingly popular. The crucial first step of a consulting collaboration is expert finding. This paper describes the FindXpRT project for finding experts via rules and taxonomies. We implemented rules for a client finding an expert to collaborate with, for an expert’s decision making on whether to collaborate, and for specifying the collaboration mode. Our expertise taxonomy is taken from the earlier project Teclantic match-making portal. FindXpRT builds on the RDF-based FOAF project, which is attracting increasing attention of researchers as well as practitioners. However, FOAF only provides person-centric facts. We complement these with rules for deriving further FOAF facts, either before (RDF) FOAF publication or, on demand, from published (RuleML) FOAF page: we implemented, in OO jDREW, both a Fact-oriented Normal Form and a Rule-oriented Normal Form.