[expertfinder-dev] Re: ExpertFinder Lunch Meeting/Expertise Vocab

[Tom Heath]

Hi all,

As promised, some more info on my draft vocab for expertise,
experience, etc. First a bit of background... The vocab was developed
based on the findings of a study I did into how people choose sources
for word of mouth recommendations; so it's very much oriented to that
application, but I hope a few of the elements will be generic enough
to be useful to the ExpertFinder community. Its working title is the
Hoonoh Ontology (as in "who know"), but don't try and dereference the
ontology URI, as this won't work yet. This is very much a first draft
which I polished up a bit with labels and comments. Whilst some
aspects of the modelling and naming may need to change, the underlying
knowledge that the vocab needs to describe needs to remain constant.

OK, background over with...

The vocab models five relationships that may have an impact on a
person's suitability as a recommendation/information source. The first
three of these (expertise, experience, impartiality) relate a Person
to a Topic; the remaining two (affinity, trackrecord) relate a Person
to another Person.

So in this context, the ExpertFinder community may choose to use
instances of the "ExpertiseRelationship" class to model expertise
relationships "from" foaf:Persons "toTopic(s)" such as beer, or
molecular biology, or hawaii, or whatever. Topics are currently
modelled as subClasses of skos:Concept, although this is not sacred.
Relationships can be (in fact should be) assigned a "value" between 0
and 1 to give some measure of the degree of expertise (or experience,
impartiality, affinity, etc).

I've put the draft of the vocab, and some example instances (just for
expertise, experience, and affinity) at:

<http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/tom/tmp/draft-hoonoh-ontology.rdf>
<http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/tom/tmp/sample-hoonoh-instances.rdf>

I'd be really interested in feedback, so please do reply on list with
any thoughts to kick-start a discussion. In particular I'd be
interested to hear thoughts on the modelling; this "relationships as
instances" felt a bit uncomfortable at first but seemed necessary as a
way to represent the value, although I have been pondering some other
kind of approach using named graphs.

Interested to hear what you all think :)

Cheers, and sorry again for the delay,

Tom.

PS. I mentioned in Innsbruck that I have an application that can/has
generated fairly large amounts of instance data against this vocab.
We're currently trying to make this more robust and more broadly
applicable, but planning a public "outing" ASAP. Watch this space.



On 05/06/07, Tom Heath <tom.heath at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Thanks for an interesting meeting at lunch. I actioned myself to
> circulate my draft vocabulary for expressing expertise, experience,
> and a few other relations. I *will* deliver on my promise, but
> unfortunately due to time pressue I'll have to renege on my commitment
> to doing it this afternoon!
>
> Apologies. More soon,
>
> Tom.
>