A User-centered Approach for Integrating Social Data into Groups of Interest
Résumé
Social network sites with large-scale public networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn have become
a very important part of our daily life. Users are increasingly connected to these services for
publishing and sharing information and contentswith others. Social network sites have therefore
become a powerful source of contents of interest, part of whichmay fall into the scope of interests
of a given group. So far, no efficient solution has been proposed for a group of interest to tap into
social data, especially when they are protected by and scattered across different social network
sites.Wehave therefore proposed a user-centered approach for integrating social data into groups
of interests. This approach makes it possible to aggregate social data of the group's members and
extract fromthese data the information relevant to the group's topic of interests.Moreover, it follows
a user-centered design allowing each member to personalize his/her sharing settings and interests
within their respective groups. We describe in this paper the conceptual and technical
components of the proposed approach. To illustrate further the approach, a web-based prototype
is also presented. A preliminary test using this prototypewas carried out and showed encouraging
results.