SAGE is a repository of experts information within the State of Florida. The SAGE Expert-Finder Knowledge Management (KM) System creates an integrated database by masking multiple databases as if they were one.

SAGE has been on-line since August 1999 and can be found at http://sage.fiu.edu. (See figure 1.) Originally, SAGE unified the researcher databases from the State of Florida University System. Currently, SAGE has access to sponsored research data from private institutions as well, such as Florida Institute of Technology, Florida Memorial College, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

SAGE gives university researchers more visibility and simultaneously allows interested parties to identify available expertise within Florida universities. This application helps to identify a researcher’s proficiency within a discipline and to facilitate a point of contact.

Benefits that SAGE provides include the following:

• SAGE helps locate researchers in Florida for collaboration with industry and Federal agencies, thereby increasing potential research funding to the Florida universities.
• SAGE combines and unifies existing data from multiple sources into one Web-accessible interface.
• SAGE incorporates a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client, an application that will be resident at each of the participating universities to automate data transfer to the SAGE server.

In October 2001, the SAGE graphical user interface was completely redesigned to maintain the uniformity visible throughout all KM Lab-hosted Web sites. The new interface provides an enhanced flash capability as well as a basic html version. SAGE also includes a thesaurus, which is a collection of concepts forming an ontology that upon request can perform a search on similar words based on the keyword in use. A consistent taxonomy is applied to improve upon the usual keyword- and full-text-based techniques. It allows an end user to retrieve information using appropriate terminology and avoids problems of poor selectivity and quality of results caused by missing, inconsistent, or conflicting vocabulary.

The use of a thesaurus can extend the capability of the Web site by generating new keywords from an existing input provided by the user. The thesaurus provides a standardized means of organizing many kinds of information, including both conceptual and taxonomic. In other words, the thesaurus is a tool designed to aid users in finding their way around a vocabulary database. In addition to its traditional use as an authority for the terms used in indexing the database, it offers suggestions of terms the user might not even have considered.

The construction of the thesaurus is accomplished using Perl programming language because of its powerful text processing capabilities. The script uses an existing pool of information from Wordsmyth Educational Dictionary-Thesaurus (WEDT) that includes over 50,000 headwords and very precisely defined and hyperlinked synonyms. It retrieves an extended set of related terms or a set of synonyms. ColdFusion 4.5 is used to cache the results of the query. In addition, the new output is used in conjunction with the Verity Search Engine that utilizes a stoplist and stemming.

To achieve results, we use interprocess communication (IPC). When a user submits a search, the script will issue an http request to a remote server by communicating through a socket (connection). The http request queries an external search engine that resides on the remote server. The script retrieves the html document generated by the search engine, parses the document by using regular expressions, and retrieves the desired information. Basically, since it is issuing a request, the script is acting as Web client.