A tool for collecting provenance data in social media

In recent years, social media sites have provided a large amount of information. Recipients of such information need mechanisms to know more about the received information, including the provenance. Previous research has shown that some attributes related to the received information provide additional context, so that a recipient can assess the amount of value, trust, and validity to be placed in the received information. Personal attributes of a user, including name, location, education, ethnicity, gender, and political and religious affiliations, can be found in social media sites. In this paper, we present a novel web-based tool for collecting the attributes of interest associated with a particular social media user related to the received information. This tool provides a way to combine different attributes available at different social media sites into a single user profile. Using different types of Twitter users, we also evaluate the performance of the tool in terms of number of attribute values collected, validity of these values, and total amount of retrieval time.