Social Bridge: searching beyond Friend of a Friend networks
Abstract
Social networking has turned into an integral constituent in our lives. There appears
to be an imperative demand for finding and linking with others to share one's day-to-day
activities. However, currently available search engines for social networking have limited
features, such as searches for people mainly by name or finding people within a single
domain. With the increasing popularity and complexity of social networks, there is a high
demand to enhance current social networks with more advanced features such as, finding
people according to their common interests, interaction patterns, or linking someone across
domains beyond Friend of a Friend (FOAF) networks. This thesis aims to develop a social search engine, called the Social Bridge that
dynamically generates an integrated social profile that portrays a user's profile of interests
and interactions with others and helps him/her in connecting to others who share these
common interests and interactions. The Social Bridge expands the FOAF concept of current
social networking by defining the social strength that represents the degree of affability
among people. Social Bridge is based on the integrated profiles of social networks generated
by the level of interactions between friends and their respective interests (e.g., friends, likes,
hash tags, etc.) extracted from their Twitter and Facebook profiles. The Social Bridge engine
has been implemented using advanced methods and techniques including Information
Retrieval Techniques (TF/IDF) and Fuzzy Logic. The Social Bridge framework is compared with the existing traditional social networking models and the proposed algorithms have
proven to be powerful and efficient in finding potential friends for large social networks. The
Social Bridge framework has been further evaluated through a survey of social network users
for their feedback on its genuineness, correctness, and scalability.
Table of Contents
Introduction -- Related work -- Social Bridge overview -- Social Bridge framework -- Evaluation -- Case study: Social Bridge for clinical trials -- Conclusion and future work
Degree
M.S.