3 Topical Profiles
In this section we define what a topical profile is, and propose
two methods for creating such profiles.
A topical profile of an individual is a record of the types
and areas of skills and knowledge of that individual, together
with an identification of levels of ‘competency’ in each
(“What does expert Y know?”). We model the profile of a
candidate as a vector, where each element of the vector corresponds
the person’s skills on the given knowledge area. This
skill is expressed by a score (not a probability), reflecting the
person’s knowledge on the given topic.