Harvesting with SONAR

Web 2.0 gives people a substantial role in content and metadata creation. New interpersonal connections are formed and existing connections become evident through Web 2.0 services. This newly created social network (SN) spans across multiple services and aggregating it could bring great value. In this work we present SONAR, an API for gathering and sharing SN information. We give a detailed description of SONAR, demonstrate its potential value through user scenarios, and show results from experiments we conducted with a SONAR-based social networking application. These suggest that aggregating SN information across diverse data sources enriches the SN picture and makes it more complete and useful for the end user.