Health is essentially a knowledge industry, with islands of expertise isolated by poor communications. Efforts to share knowledge have so far focused on explicit knowledge, mainly data, while tacit knowledge remains in the mind of the expert, only to be accessed by training or practice.

The vision of TACIT is to unlock the tacit knowledge of Europe's senior clinicians both by linguistically analysed multimedia recording and by expert location and communications. TACIT will combine this with explicit knowledge from clinical systems and research sources into a user friendly Clinical Expertise Browser.

TACIT will enable expertise sharing within healthcare Communities of Practice with the goal to reduce clinical risk and improve the quality of service to patients. TACIT will be prototyped and piloted in cancer care.

TACIT will determine the key knowledge requirements of the clinicians in the project’s two pilots. It will specify, prototype and test Ambient Knowledge Elicitation integrated with an Expertise Browser and expert locator. It will ensure that the tools can operate across multiple languages and cultures, promote the results via an aggressive dissemination campaign, and plan and implement an effective route to exploitation.