Explaining Social Relationships

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Our work is aimed at explaining relationships between entities, and in particular, between persons. We note that there is an increasing amount of social network data on the web. This data may be leveraged to provide information about relationships. In the mobile computing ecosystem, with its many mobile devices and software applications, explanations of relationships between potential communicating entities may be critical to managing interconnections. The SocialXplain project was initiated to investigate methods of generating explanations of relationships leveraging distributed social networks. We explore social network navigation aimed at finding and describing links between a source and a target person. Once relationships are determined, SocialXplain also needs to define and implement strategies for generating abstract relationship explanations.