My suggestion is that the best likely approach is to recognize people based on how other people react to them. This is like how Google decides what pages are good - if lots of people recommend it, then it is likely to be good.

There is lots of research on community dynamics and how to sort them out based on logs of the research. Unfortunately while I know that it is out there, and I know some places that use it, I don't know much about it (eg good starting places to recommend), and I do not know how much of it is public vs locked up as trade secrets of places like Google.

Therefore the best advice that I can give is to write a letter like this:

I would like to write a system that identifies people who are likely to be experts in an online chat environment based on the dynamics of the interactions between people. I know that there has been at least some work on community dynamics which could be relevant to this, and I have heard enough about you to suspect that you might be able to give me pointers on where I should start researching the feasibility of this.
And then send it to people whose publically documented interests suggest some level of interest in topics like this. Off of the top of my head, I would think that Clay Shirky is an obvious candidate either for knowing this, or for dropping names of people who might know this.

Good luck Googling for names to ask, and good luck in approaching them.

In reply to Re: Expert Detection by tilly
in thread Expert Detection by Tanalis

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