A novel method based on concept map for expert finding in online communities

Abstract

Nowadays, online communities or virtual communities on the Internet are one of the most interactive environment in which people can express
their opinions freely. There is too amount of information shared in online communities and there is no way to determine its authenticity, this is the
most important challenge in the field of knowledge sharing in online communities. Expert finding in the online communities and determine their
level of knowledge, can be used to determine the accuracy of posted comments. In this paper a new method for expert finding in online
communities based on concept mapping, is presented. In the proposed method, two measures are used. One measure is distance between concepts
of user response and concepts of question. Other measure is the number of concepts that are used in the user response. Proposed method is
implemented and evaluated on Java Online Communities, and the results showed that the correlation exceeds 0.9.