US Patent 8736612 Altering weights of edges in a social graph

A system gathers information on important and influential people and builds a social graph. The social graph can be processed to determine the influence of a node in the graph or a subsection of the graph. For the influence in a subsection of the graph, only nodes with a specific type of relationship or concept is included in the influence calculation. For example, for the concept art, only relationship that have to do with art are included in the influence calculation (e.g., museum, artists, musician). In an implementation, the edge-weight of edges of the system are dependent on a property of the edge. For example, the edge-weight for an edge tracking donations is stronger if the amount of money donated is higher.