User data distributed on the social web: how to identify users on different social systems and collecting data about them

This paper presents an approach to uniquely identify users and to retrieve their data distributed in profiles stored in different systems. The objective is exploiting the public user data available in the Web and especially in social networks. The approach does not require the implementation of specific protocols and the provision of authentication data. The evaluation provides good results that encourage us in carrying on the extension of the project. The extension we are working on is aimed at aggregating, using heuristic techniques, the data stored in the retrieved profiles and at inferring new data about the user.