An Efficient Ontology-Based Expert Peering System

This paper proposes a novel expert peering system for information exchange. Our objective is to develop a real-time search engine for an online community where users can query experts, who are simply other participating users knowledgeable in that area, for help on various topics.We consider a graph-based scheme consisting of an ontology tree where each node represents a (sub)topic. Consequently, the fields of expertise or profiles of the participating experts correspond to subtrees of this ontology. Since user queries can also be mapped to similar tree structures, assigning queries to relevant experts becomes a problem of graph matching. A serialization of the ontology tree allows us to use simple dot products on the ontology vector space effectively to address this problem. As a demonstrative example, we conduct extensive experiments with different parameterizations. We observe that our approach is efficient and yields promising results.