SPEAR - an attempt of finding experts and good knowledge artefacts

One year ago  or so I stumbled upon a guide on how you "can be an expert on almost anything", by manually identifying what knowledge was of most utility in a field. One part of this guide was about using delicio.us as a help for identifying clusters of knowledge.

Apparently, there is some research into finding algorithms that can automatically sift through and rank both people and documents, at heart using some heuristics, such as users that recommend or tag something early are more likely to be experts than later followers.

My co-worker Ching-man Au Yeung from University of Southampton and I presented the SPEAR algorithm in our joint paper "Telling Experts from Spammers: Expertise Ranking in Folksonomies" at the ACM SIGIR 2009 Conference

Läs mer: SPEAR Algorithm - Michael G. Noll