Towards a Reference Model for Social User Profiles: Concept & Implementation

Despite the recent spreading of social networks, which leads to scattered social user profile information, current user models hardly incorporate social aspects. In addition, user models are often heterogenous with respect to focus and coverage. A comprehensive view on social user profiles, however, would be required, for instance, for building sophisticated recommender systems, or to provide users with means to control disclosure and usage of their integrated profile data. Therefore, we encountered the need for a reference model, which can serve as a basis for developing more specialized models and facilitate communication among stakeholders. In this paper we present such a reference model for social user profiles, which is extensible as well as comprehensive. The proposed model provides a generic core for extensions, and a comprehensive set of concrete concepts from existing social networks and user models, as well as concepts to represent meta information. In addition, a first prototypical implementation in terms of an ontology in owl is discussed.