DS4: Introducing Semantic Friendship in Distributed Social Networks

Existing social networks are based on centralised architectures that manage users, store data, and monitor the security policy of the system. In this work, we present DS4, a Distributed Social and Semantic Search System that allows users to share and search for content among friends and clusters of users that specialise on the query topic. In DS4, nodes that are semantically, thematically, or socially similar are automatically discovered and logically organised into groups. Content retrieval is then performed by routing queries towards social friends and clusters of nodes that are likely to answer them. In this way, search receives two facets: the social facet, addressing friends, and the semantic facet, addressing nodes that are semantically close to the queries. Our experiments demonstrate that searching only among friends is not effective in distributed social networks, and showcase the necessity and importance of semantic friendship.