Leveraging Communities in Social Content Sites
Author
- Sihem Amer-Yahia (Yahoo! Research, USA)
Abstract
Social Content Sites, which integrate traditional content sites (e.g., Yahoo! Travel) with social networks (e.g., Facebook) have recently emerged as a popular Web destination for creating and sharing content and social links. We discuss new challenges in searching content on those sites and expand the discussion to community-driven information exploration. In particular, we present Social Scope, a new architecture which harnesses information from multiple social content sites and Jelly, a language to help developers build scalable information exploration applications. At the core of our architecture and language are user communities and topics which model users' interests. Finally, we examine how XML technologies can help in modeling and processing social information.
About the Speaker
Sihem Amer-Yahia (Yahoo! Research)
Sihem Amer-Yahia is a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in New York City. Her interests are at the intersection of databases, search and recommendations in social content sites. Before that, she spent 7 years at AT&T Labs in New Jersey, working on XML query optimization and XML full-text search. Sihem is an editor of the XML full-text language documents recommended by the W3C. Last year, she was on the editorial board of the Springer Encyclopedia of Database Systems as an editor of the XML entry. This year, she is editing the June 2009 Special Issue on New Avenues in Search.
Sihem chaired the Database track of CIKM 2008. She is chairing the SIGMOD 2009 Tutorials, co-chairing the VLDB 2009 Industrial track, and will chair the Social Networks and Personal Information track at ICDE 2010.