Empowering the Search of One's Social Directory

Abstract

The frequent search for information about people comes across several difficulties in current social applications. Users still have to navigate among sources to find what they look for. Besides, it gets even more difficult when the search is about fitting broader criteria than to searching for a specific someone. In this paper, we present PersOntology, an ontology to describe people, which specifies the most prominent attributes and relations in a people search context. This specification allowed gathering information from multiple sources in a single knowledge base (KB), providing an overview of a person's Social Directory. We built an interface, based on PersOntology, able to search and browse person-related information. A preliminary evaluation enabled the improvement of the ontology towards suitability with future social-based interfaces. This preliminary assessment showed that such enriched KB enables novel and more efficient interfaces, represented here as attribute search.