Many organizations regularly answer questions from their clients. While clients may complain that they spend too much time navigating the information infrastructure to get answers, the organization's experts often feel overwhelmed, because they answer the same questions repeatedly or they receive questions that are irrelevant or marginal to their expertise. As the organization's body of expertise grows and market competition increases, there arises an urgent need to satisfy the clients quickly and use the experts efficiently. To address this need, we have developed an approach to building software managers of online free-text expertise that act as intermediaries between the clients and the experts.
Our approach is to view the organization's expertise as a set of topics, each of which is a dynamic collection of free-text question-answer pairs (Q&A's). A topic is an area of the organization's expertise. A Q&A is a question previously answered by an expert. The clients ask natural language questions of the Q&A collections or browse them. The experts register their expertise on a topic, collaborate on the incoming questions, edit their answers, and add new answers.
We implemented these ideas in the Chicago Information Exchange system (CIE), an emerging Information Exchange application for managing the online free-text expertise of the University of Chicago's Computer Science Department. The class of problems addressed by CIE is best described through an example:
X is an undergraduate enrolled in CS115,
which uses the Scheme programming language.
X finds the textbook for the class terse
and wants to know if there is another book
on Scheme that he could read, too. How does
the Department make sure that X gets the
answers quickly? How can the Department see
to it that once the answers to such questions
are available they can be reused?
The objective of the CIE project is to develop a technology for building applications which organizations can use to deal with these kinds of problems. We see this technology as applicable in organizations which receive numerous questions on a large set of topics via the World Wide Web (WWW).