HySoN: A Distributed Agent-Based Protocol for Group Formation in Online Social Networks

On-line social networks allow people to easily interact with each other by means of social computer services. This scenario makes possible to search in a social network for affinities or new opportunities that satisfy specific requirements. However, for many users such activities often imply undesirable accesses to personal sensitive data. In this scenario we propose a novel approach, called HySoN (Hyperspace Social Network), based on an overlay network of software agents. HySoN allows users to locally maintain sensitive user’s data, satisfying the privacy requirements preserving sensitive data. Indeed, the properties involved in the HySoN user aggregation are inferred by local data not published in the social network. Some experimental results obtained on simulated on-line social networks data show the searching of suitable nodes is very efficient due to the topology of the overlay network, which exhibits the small-world properties.