Beyond the social search

personalizing the semantic search in social networks

Julio C. dos Reis

Rodrigo Bonacin

pp. 345-354

in: A. Ant Ozok, Panayiotis Zaphiris (eds), Online communities and social computing, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

Nowadays search mechanisms are decisive to people successfully access relevant and valuable information. In the current Web environment, people connected to each other through Social Network Services (SNSs) bring new challenges for search approaches. Recent literature in the SNS field shows expressive evolution but the approaches for searching still utilize mechanisms that just consider the syntactical processing of the information. Based on socio-cultural aspects of a SNS, we propose a novel approach that enables to provide personalized semantic search. This approach makes use of ontologies to represent the shared meanings, and consequently to present better organized, ranked and adapted search results for each SNS user. The paper presents the way the proposed mechanism was implemented and points out examples that illustrate the possibilities raised by the approach.