Using opensocial to describe the social network of a 3rd party

[Jonathan Lin]

Hello all,

I apologize if the questions in this post has been addressed before. I
was wondering if OpenSocial could be used, not to describe 1st person
relationships (ie the quintessential Facebook profile), but to
describe 3rd party relationships that had been discovered through
research, freedom of information act requests, or some sort of machine-
learned filtering.

I'm in the media/journalism business, and in the financial press, we
need to keep track of who sits on who's board of directors, and the
large number of C-level executive musical chairs that happens around
us as industries goes through acquisitions and contractions.

I'd like to use opensocial to build a researcher's map of this type of
social relations, sort of the linkedin profile that we as the public
build for a particular person: the journalist's black book - open for
all to see and all to fathom the consequences.

I can see this being a public good as well, when applied on our
politicians, who come out of one bad senate assignment only to become
the next chairperson of another obtusely named governmental body.

It'd be very interesting to see how far the social graph concept can
be pushed when applied to the complexities of business executives or
politicians.

Jonathan Lin
jhs...@gmail.com

[Arne Roomann-Kurrik]

Hi Jonathan,

  OpenSocial supports the concept of groups, so you could certainly use that functionality to represent complex relationships between users in a social network.  Of course, the burden of implementation would be up to you, but it's certainly expressible through the spec.

~Arne

[Jonathan Lin]

That's cool. I'm reading up as much as I can about the specs. It
certainly is a handful to get your mind around it.

Thanks for your encouragement.

Jonathan