delicious blog » How SPEAR Identifies Domain Experts within Delicious
http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2009/08/how-spear-identifies-domain-experts-within-delicious.html

analyzing user behavior to find experts

SPEAR (Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) is a new technique to measure the expertise of users by analyzing their public activities on platforms like Delicious.

"A major problem of the Internet today is that finding high quality information is not easy nor fast. The steady increase of spam and junk content on the Web further complicates this challenge. Another related issue is that finding knowledgeable and trustworthy users on social platforms like Delicious is much more difficult than it should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if Delicious recommended “good” users with similar interests? Or wouldn’t it be helpful if you could get a selection of great websites on jewelry or mortgage without being overwhelmed by spam? To tackle this problem, we created the SPEAR algorithm. SPEAR (Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) is a new technique to measure the expertise of users by analyzing their public activities on platforms like Delicious. A great benefit of SPEAR is that it returns two very useful sets of results: first, a list of users ranked by their expertise; and second, a list of websites ranked by their quality."

good, but missing essential parts for recommendations for educational system.

SPEAR (Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) is a new technique to measure the expertise of users by analyzing their public activities on platforms like Delicious