An Agent Based Approach to Finding Expertise in the Engineering Design Environment

During the engineering design process people need to locate colleagues with knowledge to resolve a problem. As identified by discussions with practicing designers the use of computer based systems that assist users with finding such expertise will become increasingly important. In this paper we discuss the development of an agent based Expertise Finder suitable for use within an engineering design environment. A key feature of our approach is that the Expertise Finder returns both recommended contacts and supporting documentation. The Expertise Finder bases its results on information held within the organisation, for example publications, human resource records, and not on personally compiled CVs or user maintained records. The recommendations are presented to the user with due regard to the social context. The technology used in the exemplar application allows the development of distributed, interchangeable agents that use real time data to find expertise.