Social Grail

Social Grail combines social software with semantic, information retrieval and data mining technologies to provide a solution to what is called “expert finding” in computer science. Our novelty primarily comes from the unique combination of techniques employed and some unprecedented algorithmic achievements:  

Social software is used to keep the application attractive to users and create the potential of virally growing the user base. This is particularly important for our customers who run web communities. We support open standards such as OpenID, OpenSocial and RSS to offer paths for easy migration to our solution and integrate smoothly with other web applications.  

Semantic technologies are used for content aggregation (e.g. we aggregate and integrate all information sources via RDF and RSS). Further, we use Semantic technologies as a conceptual basis for our search technology, which performs effective search in a scalable manner (e.g. we can locate people based on search terms that are not actually the exact words used the content they authored).  

Information retrieval techniques are used to efficiently power our search technology and retrieve people by competence. We use novel inverted indices to locate people by their expertise.  

Data mining techniques are used to extract information from text and provides the statistical foundation to rank people by their competences, enabling a meaningful ranking of people who know.  

Social Grail provides a novel combination of these techniques and some of our algorithms are leading edge research results.