Ambiguity Handling in Mobile-capable Social Networks

Today we experience the proliferation of social networking applications. However mobile devices are only scarcely involved as individual members in such networks. In this paper we investigate how mobile phones can participate in social networks. The phonebook of the mobile devices represents basically a small social network which belongs to the owner of the device. The paper introduces mobile-capable social networks which enables users to synchronize their phonebooks to the social network. However this solution raises problems that are not experienced by general-purpose social networks. It is possible that after the synchronization there will be duplicated profiles in the network. In the paper we discuss this ambiguity handling problem and introduce our algorithm for detecting and resolving similarities.