Finding users with expertise

One of the core strengths of Starmind's AI is its ability to identify those users who have the most relevant knowledge on any given topic. For every question that is published, Starmind uses this ability to automatically notify those users who are most likely to be able to give a good answer to this question.

Additionally, the Experts page in Starmind's user interface allows users to explore the top experts for any combination of topics interactively. Access to this page can be restricted, in case it is not desirable that all users have direct access to all of this data.

Skill wheel

The skill wheel shows the most common tags in the Starmind network, and how strongly they are connected to each other. These connections are based on whether the tags co-occur often with each other.

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Expert search

The expert search lets a user search for those users who (according to the data available to Starmind's AI) have the most expertise on a given topic, or on a combination of topics. Starmind's AI computes the best matching users in real-time. The results can change with every new interaction between a user and any relevant tag. More information on the type of interactions that can influence the expert search, can be found on the page about expertise and contributing factors.

The skill wheel automatically adapts to the tags that are selected to the expert search. Only those tags that co-occur most frequently with the selected tags for the expert search are shown.

When searching for experts for a combination of topics, Starmind takes the relationships between those topics into account in order to decide how to combine the expertise of users for the individual topics. For example, when searching for experts for “Java programming” and “IT”, Starmind will rather select Java programming experts, while avoiding users who have expertise on a wide range of IT topics but only limited specific expertise on Java programming. Users can add or remove tags to the search by clicking on the wheel or by entering a specific tag in the search bar. The skill wheel and the expert list are updated whenever the selection changes.

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