POPS: Expertise location at NASA POPS: Expertise location at NASA
Interesting case study of POPS produced by Clark & Parsia , a semantic web firm.
POPS is a NASA expertise location system which aims to “integrate NASA’s information about its nearly 70,000 combined civil service and contractor workforce in one place, linking the relevant, related information to form a comprehensive data service for staffers, workforce planners, analysts, and related personnel.”
POPS makes use of semantic Web technologies such as RDF to integrate data which are delivered via jSpace , is a visual query builder and Linked Data browser for SPARQL and other RDF query languages.
I particularly like their social network visualizer and its ability to overlay skills on top of the familiar “who-has-worked-with-whom” network (fig. 2 in the white paper), though it does look like an awful lot of navigation may be required. I also wonder about how much detail can be overlaid unto the network. Still, very nice work.
POPS' Social Network plugin
Update: The U.S. Army Engineer Research & Development Center (ERDC) is installing POPS at their Cold Regions Research Engineer Lab (CRREL) in New Hampshire according to a recent entry in FedBizOpps.Gov.
I find such licensing from one part of the government to another interesting when the entities are as different as NASA and the Army, suggesting POPS has some serious legs.