What is BesserWisser?

BesserWisser is product that helps experts to provide information to broad user communities. Real people not search engines are at the heart of the service. BesserWisser uses the Web as a meeting point and email to connect experts with enquirers. Experts enrol by selecting the categories that best fit their area of knowledge. Users can easily ask questions and rate the experts according to the quality of the answers they receive.

There are several Expert sites on the web. They all involve active human contribution where knowledge and opinions of real people help users to get the information they need. Expert sites are alternatives to the most common search engines that rely on robots and automated software to collect and index various pages on the web. Recent tests and comparisons of several search engines showed that answer quality with direct involvement of people has definitive advantages over the most common automated search mechanisms. "...some (expert) system delivers savvy, personalized assistance of a sort no search engine can." If you are a company consider using this technology in your intranet, or as a better helpdesk technology.

Who to blame

The European Environment Agency (EEA) contracted with the company Beehive to build the first version of EnviroExperts. The EEA then worked extensively on it to fit our environment and produce the product called BesserWisser. For the second version, EEA used another company, Finsiel Romania, which has re-written the product in Python.

License

We, the EEA (the owners) release this software under the terms of the Mozilla Public Licence v.1.1. Our reasons are numerous, you can read about them on Our EIONET website.

How it works

There is a simple workflow built into the system. The enquirer browses the categories and finds an expert who a) has the right expertise b) is available and c) speaks the right language. Then the enquirer fills out a form with his question. An email is then sent to the expert telling him that a question waits for an answer. The expert logs on, answers the question by filling out a form, and an email is sent to the enquirer telling him the answer is ready. The enquirer reads the answer on the website and rates the answer.

Rating of answers

Rating is done on two indirect parameters measured on a scale from 1 to 5: Did the answer solve your question: 5) Fully - 3) Mostly - 1) No. The system will automatically rate the timeliness according to; Did the answer arrive within: 5) three hours - 3) same day - 2) within two days - 1) three days to two weeks.

No answer (after 2 weeks) scores 0 on both accounts. The scores are tallied and averaged on the last 5 answers, one week, one month and one year. The scoring averages are adjusted instantaneously when an answer is rated. The two scoring parameters have two functions. The expert can see if s/he is improving, and the enquirers can get a sense of what to expect and especially how soon they can expect an answer.

Yes, the expert can send himself a lot of questions and rate himself high, but since the answers are public, people will notice if the quality of the answers doesn't match the rating.

Multilinguality and Character Sets

BesserWisser is multilingual. At the time of conception, multilinguality in Zope was still not very functional, so we decided that the navigational parts - the links, the explaining text etc. - shall be in english, whereas the questions can be posted in whatever language the enquirer and the expert shares. This gave us some worry; what would happen if i.e. greek and bulgarian was listed side by side. They don't use the same character set! Unicode (UTF-8) was the logical answer. We made some tests and found out that Netscape 4.x does not support Unicode in forms - but is ok in regular webpages. In addition there are severe limits to the font types you can use on Linux and Linux-like systems. (What we did was to have an intelligent css-file, that sends out different fonts for the styles depending on the browser.)

Since Navigator only supports 8-bit character sets in forms, we switch the webpage to the coresponding character set for that language in forms. The user must select the language he wants to use before he sees the questionaire for the question. But this is good. It gives the multilinguality features a high profile.

The Experts

Any person can be an expert - you too! BesserWisser has no tools to verify your credentials or even your name. You essentially just fill out a form with your name, email address, preferred languages, a short description of yourself and the categories you claim expertise in. A very important extra value is the number of questions you will accept per day. After that number is reached you will not be available for enquiries any more that day. Better than having an overflowed mailbox, isn't it? Similarly you can completely stop the flow, by checking the on vacation checkbox.

References

Revenge of the Know-It-Alls

This article in Wired 8.07 inspired us to suggest such a website for EEA. Also responsible for the name; BesserWisser is German for "Mr. Know-it-all". (We had an Italian title ready in case the Italian tenderer won the contract.)

How to Stop Searching and Start Finding

From the September 2000 issue of PC World magazine Posted Tuesday, July 18, 2000

All Experts

The original Q & A website, from which we took inspiration. AllExperts rates the expert - not the answer - which means you can go in and tell an expert he/she is polite without ever having seen an answer from him/her.

Law Gurus

Specialises in (American) law

Installation

Unpack the package BesserWisser.tgz under the Products folder of your Zope installation. Restart the server and start using the product.

If you run Zope 2.7, you might have to change one line. From l_file = open(join(SOFTWARE_HOME, Products, BesserWisser... to l_file = open(join(INSTANCE_HOME, Products, BesserWisser... in BesserWisser.py

Getting started

Add an object of type Besser Wisser. Everything related to this instance (categories, questions, experts) will be uploaded inside.

Enter this object and configure its attributes from the Properties tab:

• title, longtitle - used in the subjects and bodies of the mails sent to experts and enquirers - adminEmail - the email address of the administrator - servername - the email server name - serverport - the email port - nationalities - the pick-list of all possible nationalities of experts

and Languages tab. Both languages and nationalities are filled by default from the BesserWisser.ini file when adding a new BesserWisser instance.

Create a hierarchical structure of categories and let experts enrol and end users ask questions.