Participatory information search and recommendation based on social roles and networks

With the increasing popularity of social network services, a tremendous amount of information has been produced. And with more and more users involving in the SNS environment, their network relationships have become as complex as in the real world. In order to find out the useful information more efficiently, in this study, we propose a participatory search and recommendation system based on users' social roles and their relationships in the SNS environment. The proposed system is used to filter users and their messages in a participatory way by analyzing their social roles and connection networks between each user, which can further contribute to personalized information search and recommendation. We describe the design and implementation issues of a prototype system, and discuss how to use the social roles and connection networks to support and empower information search and recommendation.