Abstract: A profile or dossier of a user is constructed based partly on data culled from a data network that reveals indirect, network-mediated relationships with other individuals and groups. The profile is assembled from information, such as properties of a target individual to build an initial social circle of the target individual. References to the target individual can be derived from the direct and indirect associations in order to compile a dossier on the target individual from the references to the target individual. The initial social circle may be expanded by building respective new social circles having new associations by crawling a plurality of web sites, and deriving additional references to the target individual from the new associations in the new social circles. According to a further aspect of the method, compiling a dossier includes extracting metadata from the references.

Abstract: Web Intelligence that automatically associate different user identifiers that belong to the same user. An analytics system may include a Web crawler that crawls Web-sites of interest, e.g., social media Web-sites. The Web crawler retrieves from the Web-sites data items that were posted by users, who identified themselves on the Web-sites using various user identifiers (e.g., usernames or nicknames). The system may further include a correlation processor that automatically correlates user identifiers that appear in the retrieved data items. The correlation processor may identify different user identifiers that are used by the same user on different Web-sites. Once two or more identifiers have been associated with a given user, the network content and network activity of that user can be jointly analyzed and acted upon.