An ontological model for managing professional expertise

A precise description of user skills is important in order to assign each particular task to suitable employees in organizations. In this paper, an ontological model for managing expertise is described. This model offers a formal definition of expertise through an ontology based on UNESCO nomenclature together with other semantic relationships and keywords designed specifically for the expert recommendation task. User’s expertise is represented in our ontological model by means of Expertise Lines. An Expertise Line is a combination of formally conceptualized knowledge terms and keywords that allow increase expressiveness using natural language. The ontological model has been integrated in an application infrastructure that provides several functionalities to manage expertise and to facilitate the definition of the expertise‐based retrieval processes. The application infrastructure has been validated in expert finding tasks in order to provide suitable experts for evaluating research projects.