Social networks like Facebook and Twitter work well because people enjoy sharing their lives with friends. At the office, however, social networking with colleagues can feel forced. Many businesses are adopting social-networking tools in hopes of fostering collaboration, but if employees don't sign up or participate, the effort fails.
To get around this problem, HP Labs has created a workplace social network that builds itself. The Web application, dubbed the Collective Project, tracks internal documents created or opened by about 10,000 Hewlett-Packard employees. It assigns topic words to each document by mining its content, and then computes similarity to create knowledge maps and family trees centered around employees and subject areas. The project's goal is to show how people within a large organization can automatically be connected based on "inferred expertise," providing a resource that staff can tap into for answers to questions.
