The
NASA Faculty Awards for Research (FAR) is funding the development of
Expert Seeker, an expertise-locator Knowledge Management System. Knowledge
Management studies at KSC have confirmed the need for a centerwide
repository, which will provide KSC with intranet-based access to experts
with specific backgrounds. This system still is under development;
however, version 3.0 is now available through KSC’s intranet
(figure 1). A version containing only test data resides at Florida
International University, Knowledge Management Laboratory (FIU-KM Lab);
this version is used for development purposes.
Expert Seeker aims to help locate intellectual capital within the Center at
all educational levels. Expert Seeker maintains records of various competencies
available within the organization including items that are not typically
captured by the Human Resources (HR) applications, such as completed past
projects, training, career summaries, and other relevant knowledge. This
expertise-locator will be especially useful when organizing cross-functional
teams.
The main interfaces on the query engine in Expert Seeker use text fields to
search the proposed data for keywords, fields of expertise, names, or other
applicable search fields. The application processes the end user’s
query and returns the pertinent information. The information is collected
from a conglomeration of multimedia databases and then presented as queried.
The purpose of the Expert Seeker is to unify myriad data collections into a
Web-enabled repository that could easily be searched for relevant data.
Prior to this project, there was no single point of entry into a unified
repository that allowed identification of employees based on specific skills.
Expert Seeker allows KSC experts more visibility and at the same time allows
interested parties to identify available expertise within KSC. This system
will help to identify a researcher’s expertise within a discipline
and to facilitate communication with a point of contact.
The tools used to develop Expert Seeker are:
- Coding and programming
using ColdFusion 4.5, JavaScript, and Active Server Pages (ASP).
- Database implementation
with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.
- Search capabilities
provided by Verity.
- Graphical user
interface (GUI) design with Adobe Photoshop 5.0.
- HTML and other
Web development tools.
The development of Expert Seeker required the utilization of existing structured
data as well as semistructured information as much as possible. Figure
2 represents the architecture of Expert Seeker:
ASTAR: This HR database view provides the experts’ in-house training
courses.
Annual Training and Development Survey (ATDS): This HR database view provides
the experts’ workshops and academic classes employees are planning
to take.
X.500: This database view provides the experts’ general employee data
such as name, phone, organization, fax, and e-mail address. X.500’s unique
identifier is also used to cross-reference employees in different databases.
Skills Database:
This database view provides a set of skills and subskills used by Expert
Seeker to index the expertise search. The KSC Core Competency team
defined this set of skills and subskills as a refinement to a previous
Centerwide skills assessment.
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Figure 1: Expert
Seeker Architecture
NASA Personnel and
Payroll System (NPPS) Database: This HR database view provides the
experts’ formal education, including professional degrees and
the corresponding academic institutions. NPPS also provides the employee’s
department, used by the directorate search mode. The contents of this
database were also used to initially populate the career summary section
table.
KPRO: This database
view will be populated with project participation information through
a new project management system under development at NASA KSC.
Goal
Performance Evaluation System (GPES): The GPES is a system created
at KSC. This database view serves as the data source for profile
information such as staff achievements. GPES will replace the Skills
Database since
GPES will also be populated with KSC’s strategic competencies
and levels of expertise.
User-Specified Data: This database view is provided to support optional user-supplied
data. For example, experts can opt to provide career summaries that will
be used by Expert Seeker to augment the expertise search. A database table
to hold this information was created and linked to the system, initially
populated from the NPPS Human Resources database. Other user-supplied data
could include pictures, publications, patents, hobbies, civic activities,
etc.
Data Mining: Expert Seeker expertise search is augmented through the use of
data-mining algorithms, which build an expert’s profile based on
information published by employees on their Web pages. Similarly, a document
repository could be mined for expertise using these algorithms.
Searchable Answer-Generating Environment (SAGE): SAGE is an expertise-locator
system developed and hosted at the FIU-KM Lab to identify experts within
Florida’s universities. Expert Seeker users can define the search
scope to be within KSC or to expand it to universities in Florida. The
latter means that Expert Seeker would launch an expert search to SAGE,
and the results of this search will be integrated into one output at the
Expert Seeker GUI.
Recognizing that there are significant shortcomings of self-assessment, we
propose to use an increased reliance in technology to update employee profiles
and thus place less reliance on self-assessed data. For example, we are
proposing the use of GPES, an in-house performance evaluation tool, to
mine employee accomplishments and automatically update their profiles.
Typically, employees find it difficult to make time to keep their resumes
updated. Performance evaluations, on the other hand, are part of everybody’s
job. We therefore seek to use this tool, augmented with appropriate queries,
to inconspicuously keep the employee profiles up to date.
Key milestones (2002):
- Implementation
of the system prototype.
- Testing of the
system prototype.
- Rollout.
Contact: S.H. Chance (Steven.Chance-1@ksc.nasa.gov),
BA-C, (321) 867-4194
Participating Organization: Florida International University (Dr. I. Becerra-Fernandez)
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