• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.115-130
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• 2004

This paper proposes how to build an expert profile database in KMS, which provides the information of expertise that each expert possesses in the organization. To manage tacit knowledge in a knowledge management system, recent researches in this field have shown that it is more applicable in many ways to provide expert search mechanisms in KMS to pinpoint experts in the organizations with searched expertise so that users can contact them for help. In this paper, we develop a framework to automate expert classification using a text categorization technique called Vector Space Model, through which an expert database composed of all the compiled profile information is built. This approach minimizes the maintenance cost of manual expert profiling while eliminating the possibility of incorrectness and obsolescence resulted from subjective manual processing. Also, we define the structure of expertise so that we can implement the expert classification framework to build an expert database in KMS. The developed prototype system, "Knowledge Portal for Researchers in Science and Technology," is introduced to show the applicability of the proposed framework.