Passive User Integration in Social Networking Services

Employee knowledge is a key asset of every corporate organization. Therefore organizations strive to preserve this knowledge in its different forms in a variety of ways. One kind of such knowledge is the network of social contacts employees develop over time, incorporating meta knowledge on who knows what. These networks depend on the active participation of employees and their usefulness is reduced by passive user groups. We present an approach that allows for better integration of passive members in online social networking services. Expanding on existing approaches we propose a tagging mechanism for single elements of a user’s profile as well as an ageing and rating mechanism for these tags. We also outline an implementation of our approach.