Semi-controlled authorized information dissemination in content-based social networks

Social networks are widely used for information dissemination. In this work, for the first time, we investigate the Semi-controlled Authorized Information Dissemination (SAID) problem in content-based social networks. Within SAID, one challenge is how the authorized content providers effectively disseminate limited authorized content copies to proper interested users. We model this problem as a new Maximum Weighted Connected subgraph with node Quota (MWCQ) problem. To solve the MWCQ problem, we then propose a Dynamic Programming based SAID (DP-SAID) algorithm for the MWCQ problem. Our study shows that DP-SAID can achieve an approximation factor of O(R/2R-2) when comparing to the optimal solution.