Social networking federation: A position paper

This paper proposes the concept and the technology of social networking federation as a paradigm where information on various social network systems can be seamlessly integrated in order to provide users a uniform and semantic view of their social connections. Such a uniformly fused social network provides a single point of access where all information with respect to one's social networks can be queried and reasoned about. The goal of the research is to establish a foundation of integrating and assimilating information within multiple social network systems. We designed a reference model of social networking federation system in this paper, as well as some prototype application to demonstrate its paradigm. We believe our work would provide a novel vision of future online social network.