Enhancing Research Information Systems with Identification of Domain Experts

Research organisations and their research outputs have been growing considerably in the past decades. This large body of knowledge attracts various stakeholders, e.g., for knowledge sharing, technology transfer, or potential collaborations. However, due to the large amount of complex knowledge created, traditional methods of manually curating catalogues are often out of time, imprecise, and cumbersome. Finding domain experts and knowledge within any larger organisation, scientific and also industrial, has thus become a serious challenge. Hence, exploring an institutions domain knowledge and finding its experts can only be solved by an automated solution. This work presents the scheme of an automated approach for identifying scholarly experts based on their publications and, prospectively, their teaching materials. Based on a search engine, this approach is currently being implemented for two universities, for which some examples are presented. The proposed system will be helpful for finding peer researchers as well as starting points for knowledge exploitation and technology transfer. As the system is designed in a scalable manner, it can easily include additional institutions and hence provide a broader coverage of research facilities in the future.