Finding experts on the semantic desktop

Expert retrieval has attracted deep attention because of the huge economical impact it can have on enterprises. The classical dataset on which to perform this task is company intranet (i.e., personal pages, e-mails, documents). We propose a new system for finding experts in the user's desktop content. Looking at private documents and e-mails of the user, the system builds expert profiles for all the people named in the desktop. This allows the search system to focus on the user's topics of interest thus generating satisfactory results on topics well represented on the desktop. We show, with an artificial test collection, how the desktop content is appropriate for finding experts on the topic the user is interested in.