This site has a downloadable software tool that lets you make use of the identities individuals have constructed on various sites on the internet. It can find and aggregate these profiles in ways that can be used for a variety of tasks and analyses. At the very simplest level you can feed in the names of people you’re searching for and find their profiles on social networks. Then you can collect a number of profiles from various social networks to get a more complete picture of each person. By combining profiles you can construct as detailed a picture as possible for each one.

The tool also has automatic options to fill in profile forms with data and photos, and by using it I managed to trace profiles for individuals I have previously found hard to locate. IdentEngine works with the main social networks, but also many others – a total of 87 at the time of writing. The designer, Glenn Jones, describes it as part of a year-long personal project into combining social graph data with other open data sources.

He gives presentations on the use of social graph data in combination with other open data sources and videos and slide shows of these talks are available on the website. To get a full idea of the usefulness of this tool it’s best to take a look at the site.