United States Patent: 9,990,429

Inventors: Nie; Zaiqing, Cao; Yong, Luo; Gang, Zhang; Ruochi, Liu; Xiaojiang, Ma; Yunxiao, Zhang; Bo, Xu; Ying-Qing, Wen; Ji-Rong

发明人：聂再青、曹勇、罗刚、张若弛、刘小江、马云霄、张波、徐迎庆

Abstract: The automated social networking graph mining and visualization technique described herein mines social connections and allows creation of a social networking graph from general (not necessarily social-application specific) Web pages. The technique uses the distances between a person's/entity's name and related people's/entities names on one or more Web pages to determine connections between people/entities and the strengths of the connections. In one embodiment, the technique lays out these connections, and then clusters them, in a 2-D layout of a social networking graph that represents the Web connection strengths among the related people's or entities' names, by using a force-directed model.