SocialBROKER: A collaborative social space for gathering semantically-enhanced financial information

Social Networks constitute the key ingredient for the huge success of the so called Social Web or Web 2.0. In social networks, a user has the possibility to interact with other users without the need of meeting them. The value of social applications benefits from the network effect, which states that the value of a service to a user arises from the number of people using the service. However, the associated semantics for this kind of applications, delivered through tagging, is generally scarce, thus narrowing the range of permissible operations for exploiting these data. In this paper, we present a semantic-based social platform that incorporates the benefits of semantic Web technologies into traditional social environments. The value of the proposed framework is twofold. First, the interaction of the users with the system gives rise to semantic content that can populate a knowledge base. Then, the social-side of the platform is improved by taking advantage of the captured semantics. SocialBROKER is a prototype implementation of the proposed platform customized for the eFinance domain. It allows for creating collaborative groups that define financial-related initiatives and proposals. The integration of Semantic Web concepts and Social Networks enables our system to automatically create semantically-empowered relationships between the investors registered within the platform based on their interactions. This further allows the system to analyze the social behavior of the network members and to generate a customized profile for each of them. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.