Searching for Experts on the Web: A Review of Contemporary Expertise Locator Systems IRMA BECERRA-FERNANDEZ FLorida International University This article presents the role of ontologies and Web mining techniques in the construction and main- tenance of experts’ profiles. This article also discusses the development of contemporary expertise- locator knowledge management systems and, specifically, the implementation details of two such systems: the Searchable Answer Generating Engine (SAGE), and Expert Seeker. SAGE is a Web- based expertise locator system, which searches for researchers in universities in Florida based on specified criteria, including expertise in a specific domain. Expert Seeker’s purpose is to search for experts in one of the best-known knowledge organizations, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Implementation details, results to date, and future plans for these systems are also presented. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.5 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Online Infor- mation Services—Web-based services; H.3.4 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Systems and Software; H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications—Data mining General Terms: Design Additional Key Words and Phrases: Expertise-locator systems, expert finders, expert recom- menders, expertise management, expertise modeling, knowledge management systems, Web min- ing, Web content mining, information retrieval 1. INTRODUCTION Current trends predict that organizations of the future will most likely struc- turally resemble the modern-day movie industry as opposed to the vertically- structured industries of yesterday. This business management idea presents more than one challenge, for instance, how to identify the experts required to successfully complete an effort of such magnitude as the creation of a The author wishes to acknowledge NASA Kennedy Space Center and NASA Headquarters under the Faculty Awards for Research (FAR-99), grant no. NAG10-0259, as well as NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center and the CESDIS, contract no. NASS-32337 and subcontract no. 5555-97-74, for financial support for the development of Expert Speaker, The author also wishes to acknowledge NASA KSC and Bethune Cookman College for financial support in the development of SAGE under the auspices of the Florida Minority Institution Entrepreneurial Partnership Grant, grant no. NAGO-0220. Authors’ address: Florida International University, Miami. FL 33199; email: becferi@fiu.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. C  2006 ACM 1533-5399/06/1100-0333 $5.00 ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 6, No. 4, November 2006, Pages 333–355.