Visualizing the expertise space

Expertise management systems are being widely adopted in organizations to manage tacit knowledge embedded in employees' heads. These systems have successfully applied many information technologies developed in fields such as information retrieval and document management to support expertise information collection, processing, and distribution. In this paper, we investigate the potentials of applying visualization techniques to support exploration of an expertise space. We implemented two widely applied dimensionality reduction visualization techniques, the self-organizing map and multidimensional scaling, to generate expert map and expertise field map visualizations based on an expertise data set. Our proposed approach is generic for automatic mapping of expertise space of an organization, research field, scientific domain, etc. Our initial analysis on the visualization results indicated that the expert map and expertise field map captured useful underlying structures of the expertise space and had the potential to support more efficient and effective expertise information searching and browsing.