OPENiSME platform offers a full range of state of the art functionalities for expert searching and matching.
- Information mining capability: the platform analyses information published by experts, projects, companies that would help find the state-of-the-art on a given topic. One of the key challenges of this functionality is data representation as the information to be gathered is multidimensional and complex: expertise fields, people and organisations, projects, competence levels and reputation.
- Challenge posting: this feature allows to post a challenge or a question that an enterprise or public institution wants to solve, in order for expert individuals and companies to register on the platform and offer their services.
- Experts search and Ranking: with this feature, the platform detects and ranks the best suited experts for a particular challenge or question; this feature is most of the time associated with a semantic capability that facilitates the circulation of ideas and competences across sectors. It implies to deal with a number of difficult problems such as name disambiguation or the right definition of ‘expertise’ and ‘reputation’ to be able to rank the experts.
- Expert details collection: This functionality is necessary when experts who have been detected are not pre-registered on the platform and therefore their contact details are not known. Most of the time their details are public (personal pages, mentioned in publications etc.), but cannot be collected without painful, time consuming operations. Automation of details collection is therefore important.
- Connectivity features through the platform: the connectivity functionality, even if is considered a standard feature of connectivity / intermediation / dating platforms, has been adapted and tuned to the specific case of Innovation.