in a modern economy, the most important resource consists in human talent: competent, knowledgeable people. Locating the right person for the task is often a prerequisite to complex problem-solving, and experienced professionals possess the social skills required to find appropriate human expertise. These skills can be reproduced more and more with specific computer software, an approach defining the new field of social information retrieval. We will analyze the social skills involved and show how to model them on computer. Current methods will be described, notably information retrieval techniques and social network theory. A generic architecture and its functions will be outlined and compared with recent work. We will try in this way to estimate the perspectives of this recent domain.