Collective Cognitive Authority: Expertise Location via Social Labeling
This addresses the challenge of identifying who knows what in organizations or communities, offering a practical solution for expertise location.
The paper tackles the problem of locating expertise within a group by aggregating individual perceptions of cognitive authority through social labeling, demonstrating that this approach enables efficient and inexpensive collective knowledge mapping.
The problem of knowing who knows what is multi-faceted. Knowledge and expertise lie on a spectrum and one's expertise in one topic area may have little bearing on one's knowledge in a disparate topic area. In addition, we continue to learn new things over time. Each of us see but a sliver of our acquaintances' and co-workers' areas of expertise. By making explicit and visible many individual perceptions of cognitive authority, this work shows that a group can know what its members know about in a relatively efficient and inexpensive manner.