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Combining RDF Vocabularies for Expert Finding
– prefinal draft – ?
Boanerges Aleman-Meza1, Uldis Bojars2, Harold Boley3, John G. Breslin2,
Malgorzata Mochol4, Lyndon JB Nixon4, Axel Polleres2,5, and Anna V. Zhdanova5
1LSDIS Lab, University of Georgia, USA, 2DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway
3University of New Brunswick and National Research Council, Canada, 4Free University of
Berlin, Germany, 5Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, 6University of Surrey, UK
Abstract. This paper presents a framework for the reuse and extension of ex-
isting, established vocabularies in the Semantic Web. Driven by the primary ap-
plication of expert finding, we will explore the reuse of vocabularies that have
attracted a considerable user community already (FOAF, SIOC, etc.) or are de-
rived from de facto standards used in tools or industrial practice (such as vCard,
iCal and Dublin Core). This focus guarantees direct applicability and low entry
barriers, unlike when devising a new ontology from scratch. The Web is already
populated with several vocabularies which complement each other (but also have
considerable overlap) in that they cover a wide range of necessary features to
adequately describe the expert finding domain. Little effort has been made so
far to identify and compare existing approaches, and to devise best practices on
how to use and extend various vocabularies conjointly. It is the goal of the re-
cently started ExpertFinder initiative to fill this gap. In this paper we present the
ExpertFinder framework for reuse and extension of existing vocabularies in the
Semantic Web. We provide a practical analysis of overlaps and options for com-
bined use and extensions of several existing vocabularies, as well as a proposal
for applying rules and other enabling technologies to the expert finding task.
1 Introduction
The Semantic Web has arrived! A growing number of people and institutions provide
metadata on their personal or institutional Webpages in vocabularies based on RDF.
Microformats provide another way to embed metadata directly within XHTML docu-
ments. The GRDDL working group 1, recently founded by the W3C, provides ways to
derive semantically richer RDF from the structured data of microformats. Additionally,
the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group2is working towards
providing guidelines on how to publish and syntactically combine RDF/XML or OWL
data and ontologies. Furthermore, browser extensions such as Semantic Radar3allow
?This work has been partially supported by the EU Network of Excellence Knowledge
Web (FP6-507482), the Spanish MEC (projects TIC2003-9001, TIN2006-15455-CO3),
the German BMBF funded project Knowledge Nets and the Science Foundation Ireland
(SFI/02/CE1/I131).
1http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/grddl-wg/
2http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/
3http://sioc-project.org/firefox/
the detection of RDF data on web pages, and generic RDF browsers such as Tabula-
tor4make exploration of Semantic Web data easier. While the syntactical issues are
being solved by others, we will take a closer look here at the actual vocabularies and
ontologies that can be used for capturing metadata about persons and organisations for
publishing on the Semantic Web. We are proposing a frequently-addressed, but still
challenging, key application for the take-up of Semantic Web technologies: automating
the task of finding experts (individuals, teams, and organisations), which is a daunt-
ing manual effort at the moment. Our assumption is that when persons, institutions,
projects, and events are described in Web pages using agreed-upon machine readable
formats, the automatic location of experts/expertise in a particular area or for a particu-
lar task will become feasible. To achieve this goal, and similarly for other applications
of Semantic Web search, we identify three critical success factors:
–Common machine readable formats (syntax and semantics) supported by a
–critical mass of users (low entry barrier, tool support, reuse) as well as
–enabling technologies in place to solve practical use cases.
To this end, the following contributions are made in the remainder of this paper: In
Sec. 2 we separately discuss each of these critical success factors. Sec. 3 describes the
ExpertFinder initiative and we identify specific use cases which shall be covered within
our chosen application domain. Sec. 4 contains the core of this paper, namely, we iden-
tify several quasi-standard ontologies relevant to expert finding, their relations to our
domain, and propose how to combine them in the ExpertFinder Vocabulary Framework.
We discuss related initiatives and approaches in Sec. 5 and conclude in Sec. 6.
2 Critical Success Factors
Common machine readable formats As mentioned before, we will consider syntactical
issues to be solved for the moment and assume that people know how to publish seman-
tic annotations with their webpages and that there is proper tool support. We therefore
focus on semantic aspects, by which we mean common existing ontologies and RDF
vocabularies that can be used. The vocabularies that need to be considered comprise
areas such as descriptions of personal and institutional data (including curriculum vitae
and addresses), actual ontologies for modeling areas of knowledge/expertise, business
sectors and communities, events, and publications. In section 4 we provide an analysis
of existing vocabularies, ontologies and business standards for each of these fields.
Critical mass of users Independent of whichever vocabulary we finally decide on, in
order to really enable expert finding on a (Semantic) Web scale we have to either (i)
convince a critical mass of users and content publishers to support the chosen vocabu-
lary, (ii) translate/import existing content automatically into the chosen vocabulary, or
(iii) provide mechanisms within the chosen vocabulary that can facilitate reuse of the
vocabularies already utilised on the Web (e.g. using owl:equivalentClass and
owl:equivalentProperty). As for (i), creating a new ontology from scratch and
disseminating it within a closed community is difficult. Within the wider Web commu-
nity we can expect that enforcing the take-up of a single vocabulary is not only unlikely,
4http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab
but probably even impossible. Individual users and organisations will choose portions
of ontologies, add extensions for their own purposes and will use different URIs to
describe the same or similar concepts. In the context of (ii), text retrieval methods or
wrapper technologies facilitated by approaches like PiggyBank [13] have become more
stable and successful over the last few years. However, they still do not offer 100% pre-
cision or recall depending on how structured the underlying data source is, nor solve the
problem of the right ontology/vocabulary to use for the generated annotations. Hence,
there is nothing that can be called the right ontology for our domain and we will there-
fore focus on (iii) and try to reuse and effectively combine all existing and actually
used formats. For this purpose, we can analyse and formally define their overlaps, and
provide best practices on how to apply them together. This is the approach we focus on
in the ExpertFinder initiative. A practical side effect of reusing and extending existing
vocabularies is that we can rely on existing tools. For example, iCal [8], vCard [22],
or BibTeX [18] provide vocabularies that are supported by tools (such as calendars,
address book software) and online citation indexes, and are used already as de facto
standards for data exchange.
Enabling technologies The previous two success factors were concerned with how to
get the necessary metadata on the Web. In order to solve practical use cases, such as
the ones listed in Sec. 3, we have to consider several additional technologies. For ex-
ample, recommendation algorithms, rules, strategies, collaborative filtering techniques,
statistical methods, etc. Such methods will help to rate the value of metadata, but also
allow support in annotation tools and search engines in order to find related ontologi-
cal terms. Moreover, security and trust mechanisms allow restricting access to certain
metadata by encryption or authentication and are gaining importance as the Web gets
populated with personal information which should not be public. As a final key en-
abling technology, rules will play a crucial role in several respects. First, rules (together
with expressive ontology languages) allow us to formally define the exact relationships
between the existing vocabularies. For example, some vocabularies (e.g., FOAF, SIOC)
already formalise their structure to some degree in OWL but usually do not incorpo-
rate many more features beyond simple taxonomies expressible in RDFS alone. When
defining the exact relations between overlapping vocabularies we expect to even need
expressive features beyond OWL [9]. As there is no standard yet for defining such map-
pings rules, one could imagine SPARQL CONSTRUCT5along with built-in predicates.
For instance imagine a mapping from vCard:homeTel to foaf:phone where the
former is a datatype property and the latter an object property. Basically, a mapping
needs a conversion function, generating a URI from the source RDF literal value:
CONSTRUCT { ?X foaf:phone ?T . } WHERE { ?X vCard:tel ?T1 .
FILTER (fn:str(?T) = fn:concat("tel:",fn:encode-for-uri(?T1)))}
Secondly, rules, published together with RDF metadata, can serve to “link” or define
implicit metadata [25]. This would enable us to link to metadata published elsewhere
involving (possibly negative) dependencies [19]. Sample rules could be for instance:
5Lacking a standard language to define complex mappings as this one, we admittedly “abuse”
SPARQL FILTER expressions here for data conversion with XPath 2.0 Functions, which is
likely not (yet) supported by current engines.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i is an expert in http://en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web6.
All persons listed at http://www.rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinder_2fMembers
but not those working for companies listed at http://www.myCompetitors/ are my friends.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i is author of all publications listed
at http://dblp.uni-trier.de/Berners=Lee:Tim.html
Syntactically, one possibility is again to adopt CONSTRUCT queries from SPARQL as
a view/link definition language [20], but also here a dedicated standard is still missing.
We expect that W3C efforts like the RDF Data Access (DAWG)7and Rule Interchange
Format (RIF)8working groups will soon provide adequate solutions in this direction.
3 Practical Use Cases from the ExpertFinder Initiative
ExpertFinder9is an international collaborative initiative with the aim of devising vocab-
ulary and rule extensions (e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best practices and recommenda-
tions towards standardisation in order to annotate personal homepages, pages of institu-
tions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate metadata to enable computer
agents to find experts on particular topics. The initiative was founded in 2006 with the
goal to align related research efforts and to tackle precisely those critical factors out-
lined in Sec. 2. Among others, the following use cases were identified as potential early
adopters of properly aligned Semantic Web data and vocabularies.
Automatic generation of institutional and personal webpages from metadata and rules
RDF metadata itself is an excellent source for content management systems separat-
ing content from any layout related issues, but in a more flexible manner than current
solutions. Members of institutions could be allowed to provide their own metadata as
extended FOAF files, but, if missing, the institution itself could specify standard poli-
cies for generating implicit metadata by means of default rules. Such rules could allow
to aggregate metadata from some 3rd party sources. For instance, imagine that your
office colleague is too lazy to generate his own homepage/metadata file. No problem:
basic data can be aggregated from metadata available at the university personnel data-
base, a default publication list can be generated by the metadata extracted from DBLP,
and so on, by means of rules such as the ones in Sec. 2 or other techniques. By relying
on common metadata formats natively, exporting, querying and combining information
aggregated from different sources into annotated pages becomes trivial. Preliminary
examples of this use of FOAF and other metadata is already proposed in [10].
Human Resource Management People searching for a job could publish their CV and
profiles as metadata on the Web or employees in a company could make their skill set
and experiences available on the intranet in agreed metadata formats. Job agencies can
deploy agents which they feed with their preferred profile crawling the web to identify
suitable candidates for a given vacancy, or vice versa job vacancies could be published
6Linking to Wikipedia terms is one of many possibilities to give areas of expertise an identifier
7http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/DataAccess/
8http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/
9http://www.rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinder
in the same formats. Team building within companies can be partly automated by select-
ing the right set of employees to successfully complete a given project through seman-
tic matching and rules. ExpertFinder shall enable such scenarios and decentralise the
process of expert and job finding, as opposed to current central recruitment or corporate
portals, just as FOAF itself was aimed to decentralise social networks.
Public Semantic Research Portals The ExpertFinder idea is fruitfully applicable to
R+D community portals such as EU’s successful CORDIS 10 which enable institutions
to find and contact each other for joint research projects. Semantic enrichment of such
portals may enable refined search down to the level of individual researchers, or allow
decentralised publication by the institutions themselves. In the resulting scenario ad-
ditional requirements on assessing trustworthy information arise: Instead of providing
central portals, public bodies like the EU could assess/certify published content.
Semantic Reviewer Selection In the academic realm, finding good reviewers remains
a daunting task. However, many publications already provide pre-classified keywords
such as ACM categories. Now, using citation indexes, committees of previous confer-
ences etc. published in the agreed metadata format, one could define in a declarative
rule language (possibly with priorities) some selection criteria to find appropriate ex-
pert reviewers, or adapt the selection criteria of previous workshops, if it is published
by the organisers. Using common agreed vocabularies for categories, publications etc.
mock-up examples using a combination of declarative rules and OWL such as presented
at [9] could become a practical reality.
Trust and security for privacy-relevant meta-data In all of the above scenarios it is
desirable that (parts of) metadata can be protected, for instance by provision of time-
restricted keys for decryption during a process of rule based negotiation (cf. [5] for
pointers). Rules, similar to the ones mentioned above, can guide such negotiation. For
example, the person who wants my phone number needs to invoke a service to get my
phone number where all persons I know are registered. In the simplest case the service
could work per email and check the sha1-sum of people in my FOAF file and send
a mail back to that address with a (temporarily valid) decryption key for an encrypted
telephone number also provided in my FOAF file. For different versions of this scenario,
with different credentials, more involved negotiation processes are imaginable.
4 The ExpertFinder Vocabulary Framework
Instead of proposing a new ontology for tackling the challenges of semantic expert
finding we rather suggest a framework of existing vocabularies which shall be fruitfully
combined. As shown in Fig. 1 we identify the following “components” to describe
experts (persons, organisations or communities):
–general descriptions of persons, communities and organisations,
–relations between persons, communities and organisations,
–educational aspects,
–past and present activities and projects, and
–skills
10 http://cordis.europa.eu/en/home.html
Additional fields not uniquely connected to particular persons or organisations we want
to cover are events and publications, opinions and ratings, endorsements as well as
recommendations and references. Our goal is to pick some of the most widely used
vocabularies in these area,s check how far they are formalised, identify what overlaps
exist between these formats and how they can be reused and combined11.
Fig. 1. How to describe an expert?
4.1 Starting points: FOAF, SIOC & SKOS
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) [7] and Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
(SIOC) [6] ontologies mark the starting points of our work as, on one hand, they already
cover the description of much of the ”components” mentioned above, and, on the other
hand, they are being adopted by a steadily increasing user community.
The FOAF ontology was developed to create machine readable information/metadata
for people, groups, organisations and other related concepts - basically, to describe peo-
ple, what they do and how they interact with each other. One of the most used properties
of the FOAF ontology is the “knows” property: a simple way to create social networks
through the addition of knows relationships for each individual that a person knows.
Aggregations of FOAF data from many individual homepages are creating distributed
social networks; this can in turn be connected to FOAF data from larger online social
networking sites such as LiveJournal12 or Tribe.
In terms of definitions of expertise the FOAF ontology has a number of relevant prop-
erties, e.g. (i) the foaf:interest property defines topics of interest to a person,
and can be used directly to find those with an interest a particular domain (e.g. foaf:
interest has been used to match music preferences13), (ii) people can create foaf:
publications or other foaf:Documents (via foaf:made/maker) which may
have an associated foaf:topic or foaf:primaryTopic that can again be used
to determine a person’s domains of interest, and (iii) foaf:currentProject/
pastProject gives information on “some collaborative or individual undertaking”
that a person may be (or have been) involved in.
11 We do not aim at providing an exhaustive list of all ontologies developed in all related areas
12 http://rdfweb.org/topic/LiveJournal
13 http://foafing-the- music.iua.upf.edu/
There have been a number of extensions or modules for the FOAF ontology that are of
interest to the expert finding scenarios previously mentioned. FOAFRealm [15] is a user
profile management system based on FOAF that provides authentication, access con-
trol and social networking features such as “semantic social collaborative filtering”. The
system allows users to share and annotate their personal taxonomies across a social net-
work using WordNet, DDC14 and DMoz15 as base classifications. When implemented
in document exchange systems such as JeromeDL16, a semantic digital library, users
can classify their documents or bookmarks and allow others to access these resources
using FOAFRealm’s ACL-based social networking functionality. Each user’s collection
is assigned an expertise value that reflects the quality of the information that they pro-
vide; this value is calculated based on a PageRank calculation of their social network.
Users are then also aware of the expertise level of others on given topics.
The SIOC project17, founded by one of the authors, aims to provide a framework for the
connection and interchange of information from internet-based discussions and com-
munity portals. Such communities are primarily made up of users, the posts that they
create, and the discussion forums that they subscribe to across a multitude of sites and
discussion platforms. The basis for SIOC is the SIOC ontology, an RDF-based schema
which describes the main concepts found in online communities [6]. While there are
many classes and properties in SIOC, the main notion is that sioc:Users create
sioc:Posts that are contained in sioc:Forums that are hosted on sioc:Sites.
With respect to finding experts in a social network, the main SIOC property of inter-
est is sioc:topic defining a resource that a particular discussion post is related to;
by aggregating all the sioc:topics that are associated with a particular user’s posts
across a number of sites, a picture emerges as to where their topics of interest and re-
lated expertises lie. sioc:Forums or sites may also have associated sioc:topics,
and a user with an interest in a particular topic may be a sioc:subscriber_of a
certain discussion channel.
The Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) [16] completes the base we want
to build on. It allows to describe general terms and concepts and define many useful
properties of such terms such as declaring whether a concept is broader/narrower than
another, preferred and alternative labels in multiple languages for terms, as well as
related terms. SKOS facilitates sharing and representing terminologies that may not
extensively require the expressive power of other languages such as OWL and where
a strict hierarchy such as definable by rdfs:subclass cannot be imposed. In the
context of ExpertFinder, we can view SKOS as the basis to define and relate skills, areas
of expertise/interest (via the foaf:interest property) or topics people discuss in
online communities described by SIOC.
The SIOC ontology developers have worked with the authors of FOAF and SKOS to
align concepts and avoid any unnecessary duplication or term conflicts. The concept
of sioc:User has been defined to be a sub-type of foaf:onlineAccount, so
that existing properties from FOAF can be reused and so that new properties for users
14 http://www.oclc.org/dewey/
15 http://dmoz.de/
16 http://www.jeromedl.org/
17 http://sioc-project.org/
can be defined in SIOC without directly impacting on the FOAF ontology. As shown
in Fig. 2, a foaf:Person can own many sioc:User profiles (via the foaf:
holdsOnlineAccount relationship). Similarly, content that a sioc:User creates
on a particular Forum (e.g., a Weblog, Mailing List, Bulletin Board) can be linked using
sioc:topic to a skos:Concept (e.g., in Fig. 2 one post is talking about clouds
and another post is referring to a narrower concept, that of rain clouds). Using SKOS
to define topics under discussion and of interest combined with additional rule exten-
sions, which we plan as a next step in the ExpertFinder framework, facilitates flexible
definitions of relationships between the various skills formalised using SKOS concepts.
Fig. 2. Connections between SIOC, FOAF and SKOS
4.2 ExpertFinder Framework Extensions for the Core Vocabularies
FOAF, SIOC and SKOS largely cover general descriptions of, as well as relations be-
tween persons, communities and organisations. However, still some pieces are missing
in order to obtain a complete picture of Fig. 1:
–FOAF misses detailed information about address data, but complementary stan-
dards such as vCard close this gap.
–The only relation between persons in FOAF is foaf:knows, but as we want to
support more fine-grained relations, we propose the RELATIONSHIP & XFN vo-
cabularies to close this gap.
–Projects can be linked to persons and groups by foaf:currentProject and
foaf:pastProject. However, this might again be too coarse-grained if e.g. we
want to know the exact timing of a project and we want to provide guidelines on
how to annotate projects. We propose the use of DOAP here.
–More detailed CV information can be provided by the DOAC vocabulary.
–In the scientific context, publications are an important measure of expertise. These
can be linked by the foaf:maker and foaf:publication attributes to the
foaf:Document class, but details on how to describe publications are missing.
A de facto standard in the scientific community in this area is BibTeX.
–As for describing skills and topics of interest, SKOS defines a general framework,
but details of concrete classifications to use for annotation are missing.
–Finally, events and their participants are not yet describable in a sufficient manner.
iCal as a de facto standard for sharing events is a natural candidate to fill this gap.
A preliminary list of mappings for overlapping concepts and attributes in the men-
tioned vocabularies is omitted here for lack of space, but available at http://www.
rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinder_2fmappings
Refining Personal Data: vCard vCard is a standard for representing personal data
such as business cards. Although there are various forms in which vCard data can be
written, our interest is on the RDF-based representation 18. Contact information, such
as phone numbers or email-addresses can be expressed more fine-grained in vCard
than in FOAF by means of distinguishing properties such as vCard:homeTel and
vCard:workTel. Note, however, that vCard phone numbers are not directly map-
pable to foaf:phone as a subclass, as vCard uses RDF literal values whereas foaf
uses URIs using the fully qualified tel: scheme. A workaround we propose is to adopt
FOAF’s representation in vCard/RDF and make the respective properties subproperties
of foaf:phone, or otherwise define straightforward mapping rules for conversion.
Such mappings can not necessarily be bidirectional, e.g., vCard:email may not be
simply mapped to foaf:mbox as a foaf:mbox is supposed to be unique for a per-
son, which is not necessarily the case for vCard. Affiliation information or role infor-
mation in vCard can indicate knowledge areas or particular expertise aspects, which
again should be linkable to SKOS concepts.
Refining Relations: RELATIONSHIP & XFN RELATIONSHIP19 and XFN20 (XHTML
Friends Network) are two vocabularies used for describing interpersonal relationships.
Since foaf:knows describes relationships between people rather sketchily, these vo-
cabularies are deployed to fill the gap and assert such relationships in more detail by
defining different subproperties.
Refining Project Descriptions: Description of a Project (DOAP) DOAP21 is an XML/RDF
vocabulary mainly conceived to describe open source projects. Its initial goals include:
(i) internationalisable description of a software project and its resources; (ii) data ex-
change between software directories; (iii) automatic configuration for resources such as
shared CVS repositories; (iv) interoperability with other popular Web metadata projects
(RSS, FOAF, DC) and (v) the ability to extend the vocabulary for specialist purposes.
DOAP describes the current state of a project but it does not highlight changes and up-
dates. Nevertheless, to keep the repository up to date with releases, the CodeZoo with
an Atom22 feed containing embedded DOAP can be used. Nevertheless, even if a feed
to keep older versions can be used for DOAP a way to transform the information into
RDF and to distinguish between current release and past releases is still needed.
18 http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf,http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns
19 http://vocab.org/relationship/
20 http://gmpg.org/xfn/join
21 http://usefulinc.com/doap/
22 http://www.codezoo.com/about/doap_over_atom.csp
DOAP uses foaf:Person to describe the corresponding contributors of each project
part (e.g. project maintainer, developer). From the FOAF side, the use of foaf:project,
foaf:currentProject and foaf:pastProject properties do not really allow
to define the duration of participation in a certain project. Neither are project durations
definable properly in DOAP alone. We suggest to remedy this problem by either adding
new attributes for start and end (possibly subclassing iCal events) or using temporal
RDF as mentioned below.
Refining CV information: Description of a Career (DOAC), Resume RDF Schema and
BIO Vocabulary: DOAC23 is a RDF metadata vocabulary to describe professional ca-
pabilities of workers gleaned for example from CVs or resumes. The metadata enhances
specific description and facilitate the search to locate suitable (regarding the given po-
sition requirements) job candidates. DOAC has been designed to be compatible with
the European CV (known as Europass), which can be generated from a FOAF+DOAC
file. It includes information about education, work experience, publications, spoken
languages and other skills that can be shared and processed by applications. As an al-
ternative, one of the authors [4] proposes the Resume RDF schema24 for extending
FOAF profiles with curriculum vitae information. This schema includes terms for work
and academic experience, skills, courses and certifications, publications, references, etc.
Again, we propose to link to SKOS concepts to describe the respective concepts. BIO25
describes biographical information about (living and dead) people and has been de-
signed to be compatible with both RDF and non-RDF XML formats.
DOAC uses the foaf:Person class to general descriptions of job seekers and foaf:
Organisation to define which schools and institutions the individual attended. Fur-
thermore, the foaf:pastProject concept could be added as a subclass to the
doac:Experience class. This would allow description of not only a job seeker’s
general experiences in a company but also their experiences in different projects. Next,
the doac:publication property which establishes a connection between the foaf:
Person and doac:Publication can be defined as a foaf:publication link-
ing foaf:Person with foaf:Document.
Refining Bibliographic Descriptions: BibTeX, DC and others BibTeX was designed by
Patashnik and Lamport in 1985 as the LaTeX bibliographic format [18] and has estab-
lished itself as a de facto standard format for publishing bibliographic information in
several online citation indices. Several RDF versions of BibTeX exist, e.g., bibtex2rdf26
or bib2rdf 27 where the former seems to be wider adopted and also reuses existing for-
mats in the same spirit as ExpertFinder. This could be directly adopted or combined
with more comprehensive ontologies for digital libraries such as MarcOnt28. As Mar-
cOnt also allows to import/export BibTeX, we currently suggest the RDF vocabulary
supported by bibtex2rdf (cf. [10]). The Dublin Core (DC) initiative, started 10 years ago
23 http://ramonantonio.net/doac/
24 http://purl.org/captsolo/semweb
25 http://vocab.org/bio/0.1/
26 http://www.l3s.de/˜siberski/bibtex2rdf/
27 http://www.cs.vu.nl/˜mcaklein/bib2rdf/
28 http://www.marcont.org/
by librarians in order to provide a metadata standard for describing documents, may be
viewed as a subset of bibtex, and is actually reused by bibtex2rdf.
Classifications & Standards for Skills and Topics In the following we describe a few
selected standards and classifications of occupations, competencies and economic activ-
ities as possible schemes which could be used for defining skills and topics of interest.
Some of these standards are used for example as an instrument for assembling and pre-
senting statistics of education/training on national as well as international level, some
others are developed for fostering international comparability of data in studying eco-
nomic phenomena. While the national and international types of classifications are used
for example by federal agencies for education and training statistics, the international
standards should also facilitate international communication.
The Occupational Classification (SOC)29 system is used by federal US statistical agen-
cies to classify workers into over 820 occupational categories, grouped into23 major
groups, 96 minor groups, and 449 broad occupations. Each broad occupation includes
detailed occupation(s) requiring similar job duties, skills, education, or experience. The
Profession Reference Number Classification (BKZ)30 is a German version SOC, detail-
ing 5597 occupations. The International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-
88) is developed to facilitate international communication regarding occupations and
occupational groups. Persons are classified by occupation through their relationship
to a past, present or future job. The International Standard Industrial Classification
of All Economic Activities (ISIC) 31 is a standard classification of economic activities
arranged to classify entities according to the type of activity they carry out. North Amer-
ican Industry Classification System (NAICS)32 provides common industry definitions
for Canada, Mexico, and the US to facilitate economic analyses. Further standards to
classify products and services like eCl@ss,eOTD, or the RosettaNet Technical Dictio-
nary, or UNSPSC could also partly serve to describe skills and topics. All these are
however, with few exceptions such as e.g. eCl@ssOWL [12], not (yet?) available in
“ontologised” versions. Mappings of concepts into SKOS terms is an open issue on our
agenda. A key issue here is to assign proper URIs usable in RDF to these concepts:
However, apart from special suitable classification systems which yet need to be “we-
bised”, a simpler possibility to define topics which we already used in an example of
Sec. 2, was simply referring to an online encyclopedia such as Wikipedia. Recent efforts
towards semantically structuring wikis (cf. [14]) support such an approach. For some
smaller domains such as e.g. computer science, ACM categories 33 or the WWW Con-
ference Archive areas 34 already provide URI-addressable categories of topics, usable
as SKOS terms, e.g. using the latter, we refine the example of Sec. 2 to:
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i is an expert in http://wwwconf.
ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/2004-C4.html
29 http://www.bls.gov/soc/
30 www.arbeitsamt.de/hst/markt/news/BKZ_alpha.txt
31 http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcst.asp?Cl=17&Lg=1
32 http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/naics.html
33 http://www.acm.org/class/1998/
34 http://wwwconf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/subjects.html
where we can further add:
http://wwwconf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/2004-C4.html is skos:
narrower than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web.
Events and termporal information iCal [8] as a de facto standard for calendar informa-
tion supported by many applications is a natural starting point for ExpertFinder to refer
to events. RDF formats and conversion tools for iCal are available35. Still, iCal alone
might not be sufficient to denote e.g. the validity duration of certain RDF information
such as participation duration in a project. Exploring the use of RDF extensions by tem-
poral information [11] to express the validity duration of triples would be an interesting
option, but standardisation of such extensions does not yet seem to be in sight.
5 Related Projects, Initiatives and Approaches
Many other projects and initiatives overlap with or are relevant to the ExpertFinder
initiative. As an umbrella initiative involving several organisations, some of these ef-
forts are continued among the ExpertFinder participants and results will be exchanged
both from these to ExpertFinder and vice versa, giving ExpertFinder the opportunity to
already impact through its work into present activities as well as being open to these
activities to impact upon the broader ExpertFinder efforts.
5.1 Related projects
Several projects in the Semantic Web realm have already created their own ontologies
for describing persons, organisations and activities. For instance, the KnowledgeWeb
platform ontologies36, the AKT portal ontology37 , the SWRC portal ontology38, and
the DERI Semantic Web Portal (SWP) working group’s ontology39 cover many aspects
of the expert finding domain, and could thus be arguably seen as equally valid starting
points. However, so far these approaches seem to have experienced little take-up outside
the projects where they have been developed and were developed from scratch rather
than being based in pre-existing vocabularies or de facto standards. Only the DERI SW-
portal ontology reuses FOAF, RSS and BibTeX to some extent, while such reuse is a
central rationale in our approach.
Some related projects conducted by ExpertFinder initiative members have already fol-
lowed this rationale, like Knowledge Nets, SemDis, FindXpRT and SIOC.
The Knowledge Nets40 project explores the potential of Semantic Web from a business
and a technical viewpoint by means of pre-selected use case scenarios. For this pur-
pose, a prototype for the e-Recruitment domain containing the online job seeking and
job procurement processes has been developed [2, 17, 21]. The requirements analysis
35 http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/,http://www.kanzaki.com/courier/
ical2rdf or http://torrez.us/ics2rdf/
36 http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/semanticportal/OWL/
37 http://www.aktors.org/ontology/portal
38 http://swrc.ontoware.org/ontology
39 http://sw-portal.deri.org/ontologies/swportal
40 http://wissensnetze.ag-nbi.de
revealed the necessity of aligning with commonly used domain standards and classi-
fications (SOC, BKZ, WZ2003, NAICS, HR-XML41 and Skill Ontology) in order to
integrate job seeker profiles and job postings as well as to support common practices
from industry. Reusing these standards, the HR-ontology contributes to the realisation
of more powerful and flexible e-Recruitment solutions which include advanced search
and presentation facilities based on knowledge about the application domain.
The SemDis project addresses development of query/discovery techniques for semantic
relationships. For example, dblp:co-authorship and foaf:knows were used
to detect possible conflicts of interest between reviewers and authors in a peer-review
process [1]. An extension on such work aims at determining possible reviewers by com-
paring their expertise to the topics of a paper. The expertise of a person on different
topics or areas is described using the SwetoDblp dataset42, a large populated ontology
of computer science publications based on the DBLP43 bibliography database.
The FindXpRT (Find an eXpert via Rules and Taxonomies) [25] focuses on the impor-
tant aspect of rules by combining FOAF facts and RuleML [3] rules. This implemented
system44 allows users to derive FOAF data by deploying person-centric rules, either
before FOAF publication or, on demand, from published (RuleML FOAF) pages.
Finally, the SIOC initiative, which forms a central part of the ExpertFinder framework
is being developed by and in collaboration with initiative members with cross-fertilizing
effects between the two initiatives.
5.2 Community-Driven Approaches
In this paper we focused on the specific domain of expert finding and explored “estab-
lished” vocabularies in this domain. Other Web and Semantic Web application areas
show the dynamics and need for alignment even more drastically: A recent trend in
many popular non-academic portals is to allow communities to create their own vocab-
ularies and tag the items/information they want to share with others with arbitrary tags
from their vocabularies: The del.icio.us portal45 allows communities to tag and share
their bookmarks, and search others bookmarks on the basis of these tags. The 43Things
and 43Places community portals46 allow describing and sharing by community-created
tags information about the things people do and places they travel or want to travel.
flickr47 allows members to share, search and tag photos, again with arbitrary tags.
GoogleBase48 is a community application which allows Web users to share and search
arbitrary items (pictures, text, ads, web-sites) and annotate these items using arbitrary
attribute-value pairs. Most popular/shared attributes and attribute values come up in the
upper level of Google search interfaces and are proposed to be used for searching and
browsing the available items.
41 Developed by the HR-XML Consortium, http://www.hr-xml.org
42 http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/semdis/swetodblp/
43 http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/˜ley/db/
44 http://www.ruleml.org/usecases/foaf/JieLiMCSThesis.pdf
45 http://del.icio.us
46 http://www.43things.com and http://www.43places.com
47 http://www.flickr.com
48 http://base.google.com
None of these portals is based directly on Semantic Web technologies. However, the
offered functionality is reminiscent significantly of earlier academic proposals in the
Semantic Web realm, e.g. the People’s Portal [23]. The examples reveal a trend of the
Web becoming more structured and annotated in a community-driven manner via so-
cial processes and contributions of Web users. Reuse and adoption of already existing
broadly used formats as we propose here could accelerate this process on the one hand,
and on the other hand extensions for existing vocabularies could be developed in a
community-driven process.
A common problem in completely unguided community-driven approaches is that enti-
ties and tags are different, yet semantically similar. This tendency brings difficulties for
the community members in reuse of the community-contributed knowledge contained
in the system. Defining mappings and finding an agreement on a meta-level upon which
tags might become superfluous/deprecated by enforcing best practices are crucial for
applications in an open web environment. Existing community-driven proposals ignore
this problem to a large extent, or, in the most advanced cases, users are proposed to
create ad-hoc, non-reusable alignments to achieve a specific task. Minimal support for
reuse, such as auto-completion of tag names or suggestion of related search terms in an-
notation tools and search engines is partly supported by the above-mentioned platforms
but mappings are not definable themselves in a community-driven process.
Community-driven ontology management and ontology matching extends conventional
ontology matching by involving end users, knowledge engineers, and developer com-
munities in the processes of establishing, describing and reusing vocabularies and inter-
ontology mappings [24]. We believe that easy to use mapping and rules languages and
tools as the next logical step. However, as we mentioned already in Sec. 2, a standard
format for defining these mappings is still missing.
6 Conclusions and Outlook
We described the integration of efforts of members of the ExpertFinder initiative to-
wards a common goal: combining commonly-agreed vocabularies including but not
limited to describing information of people and their expertise, organisations, contact
information, social and collaborative networks, etc. As members of this initiative, we
have described various practical use cases for the task of expert finding which we iden-
tified as promising applications for actual take-up of Semantic Web technologies. We
described three key success factors for bringing agreement and facilitating the take off
of a joint vocabulary for expert finding. Based on this, we proposed the ExpertFinder vo-
cabulary framework which stresses reuse and cautious extension of existing and estab-
lished vocabularies in the Semantic Web. In this framework, we described how FOAF,
SIOC and SKOS mark the starting points. We also discussed how to use these together
extended with various existing vocabularies, pointing out the necessity for formal map-
pings between overlapping terms which we provide at the initiative’s Web page. Along
the way, we have given a survey and analysis of the related vocabularies and classifica-
tions which, although restricted to the particular domain of expert finding, we hope to
be useful as such also for other related Semantic Web applications. Although we deem
the core defined so far a useful start which can already be used to cover several of our
proposed use cases, we have to leave some extensions towards security, reputation and
trust mechanisms (e.g., referencing endorsements or trust ontologies), which we only
treated superficially so far, for future work.
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