On Geo-social Network Services

A social network service focuses on building and maintaining of social networks for communities. Although geographic information plays an important role in daily life, it is not widely used in current social network services. Some geographic information websites ignore the social network building mechanism, while some social network sites with geographic features make little use of geographic information except for display. As a result, we propose a geo-social network service for individuals building and managing social network online. Users can define geographic information, such as location, with a place name and a corresponding coordinate-based object, which can be called a geo-Tag. The system can help users find appropriate persons to make friends with, according to the similarity among geo-Tags from different users. Furthermore, information from World Wide Web related to a geo-Tag can be provided to each user with the help of geographic information retrieval techniques.