Collective Cognitive Authority: Expertise Location via Social Labeling

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for identifying individual expertise within a group by leveraging social labeling, making collective knowledge about members' expertise explicit and accessible.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to expertise location that utilizes social labeling to efficiently reveal collective cognitive authority.

Findings

Social labeling effectively identifies expertise across diverse topics.

The method improves knowledge sharing within groups.

Explicit visibility of expertise enhances group decision-making.

Abstract

The problem of knowing who knows what is multi-faceted. Knowledge and expertise lie on a spectrum and one's expertise in one topic area may have little bearing on one's knowledge in a disparate topic area. In addition, we continue to learn new things over time. Each of us see but a sliver of our acquaintances' and co-workers' areas of expertise. By making explicit and visible many individual perceptions of cognitive authority, this work shows that a group can know what its members know about in a relatively efficient and inexpensive manner.