Social Overlay: P2P Infrastructure for Social Networks

Web 2.0 provides functionality of social content based on data generated by users. Users spend their time by browsing content and look for interesting contents using keyword search. Those contents are posted and shared for their interesting tastes by like-minded people. New and popular contents, keywords, or recommendations may also be offered to users by their friends. People are separated over many existing social sites which make it difficult to know the social relationship among the users. Most of the current search engines don't utilize social connection of users to resolve their query. Search results need to be personalized based on the user's context and should take the benefit of people relationship and their contribution. The user's contributions include many implicit and explicit indicators of interest - tagging, rating, and browsing activities; friendships, and the activities of friends. Much of the information is still restricted to different sites and search is not possible due to the lack of technical and semantic interoperability, locking in knowledge resources in disconnected islands. A successful environment for competence development and lifelong learning must be built on top of an infrastructure that utilizes the relationship between people and their interaction with people to people, people to content. This paper describes the approach of integration of this information from different sources bringing together the concept from semantic technology, P2P and social sites.