Patent ID: 8185558

Claim:
A method comprising: maintaining, by one or more computing systems, access to a data store of information corresponding to one or more of a plurality of users of a social network environment and one or more of a plurality of concepts and comprising: a plurality of nodes including a set of user nodes that each correspond to a respective user, and a set of concept nodes that each correspond to a respective concept, each node of the sets of nodes being associated with a corresponding structured document; and a plurality of edges that each define a connection between a corresponding pair of nodes from the plurality of nodes; for each of one or more users: scanning, by one or more of the computing systems, one or more items of content stored or identified with the user node corresponding to the user; identifying, by one or more of the computing systems, a candidate item of content from the one or more items of content; searching, by one or more of the computing systems, the stored information for one or more matches between the candidate item of content and existing nodes from the set of concept nodes; determining, by one or more of the computing systems, whether or not a match between the candidate item of content and an existing node from the set of concept nodes exists; and when the one or more computing systems determine that at least one match exists: generating, by one or more of the computing systems, an edge from the node corresponding to the user to the node from the set of concept nodes for which the best match is determined; and when the one or more computing systems determine that no match between the candidate item of content and an existing node from the set of concept nodes exists: generating, by one or more of the computing systems, a new node in the set of concept nodes based on the candidate item of content; and generating, by the one or more computing systems, an edge from the node corresponding to the user to the new node.