A Social Nexus for Privacy-Assured Personalization Brokerage

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Partners: TU Wien, Netural GmbH Linz

Funding: FFG - FIT-IT Semantic Systems

Employed Technologies: Java, OWL, Jena, Web Services, Social Network APIs (wie z.B. Graph API for Facebook), Information Extraction Tools (e.g., GATE)

Web: http://social-nexus.net

Team: DI Martin Wischenbart M.Sc., DI (FH) Dr. Johannes Schönböck, DI (FH) Dr. Stefan Mitsch, DI Dr. Angelika Kusel, Ass. Prof. Mag. Dr. Elisabeth Kapsammer, Assoc. Prof. Mag. Dr. Wieland Schwinger M.Sc., a.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Werner Retschitzegger, Daniel Neidhart


Summary of Project Focus. Social networks on the Web have seen enormous growth over the past few years reaching now truly widespread adoption. Since every social network is focused on serving specific human needs, social networkers are present in a number of different networks, leading to scattered social content. This restraint view on social content carries the potential pitfall of untargeted services like indiscriminated product offers of service providers, being a major obstacle in generating revenue. This situation is aggravated by the fact that social networkers are particularly reluctant to share social content with service providers - which would be, however, necessary to enable personalization - at least as long as it is obscure and beyond their control, if and how their social content is being exploited.


In the course of a FIT-IT project we will develop TheHiddenU, a system whose main goal is to exploit the encouraging win-win situation between social networkers and service providers with respect to personalization, by inventing semantic-based mechanisms to leverage techniques for integrating, profiling and privatising social content. The innovative character of TheHiddenU stretches over three unique but highly interwoven research goals. Firstly, TheHiddenU aims at providing a single point of access to social networks in terms of an integrated semantic representation of scattered social content by employing a hybrid integration approach for schema level and instance level. Secondly, TheHiddenU foresees semantic-based profiling mechanisms in order to discover the "hidden" you and brokerage facilities bringing together social networkers and service providers in a controlled way, thus enabling highly personalized services. Thirdly, TheHiddenU focuses on privacy concerns by providing social networkers with awareness and ample control regarding disclosure and usage of their social content.


The solutions for these challenges are realized by means of TheHiddenU prototype and provide the technical prerequisites for a brand new, sustainable business model for the Social Web - personalisation brokerage. The method for evaluating TheHidden builds on three major pillars, comprising experiments, empirical studies, and a case study, which will be conducted in cooperation with our demonstrators. Thus, TheHiddenU will represent a research test bed as well as an industrial showcase for further commercial exploitation.


Publications:

    2013

  1. Martin Wischenbart, Stefan Mitsch, Elisabeth Kapsammer, Angelika Kusel, Stephan Lechner, Birgit Pröll, Werner Retschitzegger, Johannes Schönböck, Wieland Schwinger, Manuel Wimmer . Automatic data transformation: breaching the walled gardens of social network platforms. Proceedings of the Ninth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling - Volume 143. APCCM '13, pages: 89--98. Australian Computer Society, Inc., 2013. PDF BibTeX 
    @inproceedings{Wischenbart2013,
       title = {{Automatic data transformation: breaching the walled gardens of social network platforms}},
       author = {Martin Wischenbart and Stefan Mitsch and Elisabeth Kapsammer and Angelika Kusel and Stephan Lechner and Birgit Pr\"{o}ll and Werner Retschitzegger and  Johannes Sch\"{o}nb\"{o}ck and Wieland Schwinger and Manuel Wimmer },
       year = {2013},
       publisher = {Australian Computer Society, Inc.},
       booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling - Volume 143},
       pages = {89--98},
       series = {APCCM '13}
    }

    2. 2012

  2. Elisabeth Kapsammer, Angelika Kusel, Stefan Mitsch, Birgit Pröll, Werner Retschitzegger, Wieland Schwinger, Johannes Schönböck, Manuel Wimmer, Martin Wischenbart, Stephan Lechner. User Profile Integration Made Easy - Model-Driven Extraction and Transformation of Social Network Schemas. Int. Workshop on Interoperability of User Profiles in Multi-Application Web Environments (WWW 2012). WWW '12 Companion, pages: 939--948. ACM, 2012. PDF BibTeX 
    @inproceedings{Kapsammer2012,
       title = {{User Profile Integration Made Easy - Model-Driven Extraction and Transformation of Social Network Schemas}},
       author = {Elisabeth Kapsammer and Angelika Kusel and Stefan Mitsch and Birgit Pr\"{o}ll and Werner Retschitzegger and Wieland Schwinger and Johannes Sch\"{o}nb\"{o}ck and Manuel Wimmer and Martin Wischenbart and Stephan Lechner},
       year = {2012},
       publisher = {ACM},
       booktitle = {Int. Workshop on Interoperability of User Profiles in Multi-Application Web Environments (WWW 2012)},
       pages = {939--948},
       series = {WWW '12 Companion}
    }

    3. 2011

  3. Elisabeth Kapsammer, Stephan Lechner, Stefan Mitsch, Birgit Pröll, Werner Retschitzegger, Wieland Schwinger, Manuel Wimmer, Martin Wischenbart. Towards a Reference Model for Social User Profiles: Concept & Implementation. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Personalized Access, Profile Management, and Context Awareness in Databases, at 37th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB). 2011. PDF BibTeX 
    @inproceedings{Kapsammer2011,
       title = {{Towards a Reference Model for Social User Profiles: Concept \& Implementation}},
       author = {Elisabeth Kapsammer and Stephan Lechner and Stefan Mitsch and Birgit Pr\"{o}ll and Werner Retschitzegger and Wieland Schwinger and Manuel Wimmer and Martin Wischenbart},
       year = {2011},
       booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Workshop on Personalized Access, Profile Management, and Context Awareness in Databases, at 37th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB)}
    }
  4. Elisabeth Kapsammer, Stefan Mitsch, Birgit Pröll, Wieland Schwinger, Manuel Wimmer, Martin Wischenbart. A First Step Towards a Conceptual Reference Model for Comparing Social User Profiles. Proceedings of the International Workshop on User Profile Data on the Social Semantic Web, at 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC). 2011. PDF BibTeX 
    @inproceedings{Kapsammer2011a,
       title = {{A First Step Towards a Conceptual Reference Model for Comparing Social User Profiles}},
       author = {Elisabeth Kapsammer and Stefan Mitsch and Birgit Pr\"{o}ll and Wieland Schwinger and Manuel Wimmer and Martin Wischenbart},
       year = {2011},
       booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Workshop on User Profile Data on the Social Semantic Web, at 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC)}
    }

    5. 2010

  5. Gerti Kappel, Johannes Schönböck,, Manuel Wimmer, Gabriele Kotsis, Angelika Kusel, Birgit Pröll, Werner Retschitzegger, Wieland Schwinger, Roland R. Wagner, Stephan Lechner. TheHiddenU - A Social Nexus for Privacy-Assured Personalisation Brokerage. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS). Filipe, Joaquim and Cordeiro, Jose, editors, pages: 158-162. SciTePress, 2010. PDF BibTeX 
    @inproceedings{Kappel2010,
       title = {TheHiddenU - A Social Nexus for Privacy-Assured Personalisation Brokerage},
       author = {Gerti Kappel and Johannes Sch\"{o}nb\"{o}ck, and Manuel Wimmer and Gabriele Kotsis and Angelika Kusel and Birgit Pr\"{o}ll and Werner Retschitzegger and Wieland Schwinger and Roland R. Wagner and Stephan Lechner},
       year = {2010},
       publisher = {SciTePress},
       booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS)},
       pages = {158-162}
    }