Towards a portal and search engine to facilitate academic and research collaboration in engineering and

While international academic and research collaborations are of great importance at this
time, it is not easy to find researchers in the engineering field that publish in languages
other than English. Because of this disconnect, there exists a need for a portal to find
Who’s Who in Engineering Education in the Americas. The objective of this thesis is to
built an object-oriented architecture for this proposed portal. The Unified Modeling
Language (UML) model developed in this thesis incorporates the basic structure of a
social network for academic purposes. Reverse engineering of three social networks
portals yielded important aspects of their structures that have been incorporated in the
proposed UML model. Furthermore, the present work includes a pattern for academic
social networks.