A User-Centric Approach for Social Data Integration and Recommendation

It is difficult for online users to keep track of their social friendships and friends´ social activities scattered across different social networking sites. We propose a user-centric approach for integrating social data from different social networking sites and allowing users to create personalized social and semantic contexts for their social data. Users can blend and group friends on different social networking sites. They can also rate friends and their activities as favourite, neutral or disliked. Our approach then provides personalized recommendations of friends´ activities that may be interesting to each user. A prototype of a dashboard application called SocConnect (Social Connect) is also implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, along with evaluation on real users that confirms the appropriateness and effectiveness of our approach.