Abstract

Finding people having similar interests in online community is an interesting but challenging problem. Especially, in distributed multidisciplinary research network, locating scientists who share common interests to collaborate and solve large scientific problems is becoming more important. This paper introduces a method for extracting and modeling scientists’ interest profiles from their day-to-day interactions and a method for semantically matching interest profiles based on latent semantic analysis. These methods exclude the necessity of having ontology for semantic matching of profiles, while still maintain the ability to reason about the semantic meaning of words.