Using Ontologies for Developing a Search Mechanism in Social Networks

Online social networks are a particular type of virtual community and in recent years they have attracted many people. These networks provide various features for users and allow them to construct a profile and share their information. Hence searching in users’ profiles and their information is one of the most common operations in social networks. In this paper, we present a search method based on ontology in which for each profile in social network an ontology is created and then the same is done for user’s query. Using ontology matching techniques these ontologies are matched with each other and the similarities between them are computed. Finally according to similarities, results related to user’s query are found and represented. The experiments show that the presented method is efficient and provide satisfactory results.