Open Standards And Social Networks
I turned in a paper today (actually a 'Literature Review') for a class about the topics you see here in the title. There were several other interesting topics to choose from, but I came up with this one myself for three main reasons. First, Open Standards are something I've supported anyway. It comes with the territory of being an enthusiastic Linux user. Secondly, despite my introverted nature and hermit-like habits, I actually find social networks and their workings, as well as applications of their use to be very interesting. Thirdly, because I really do believe that the application computing to social networks is going to revolutionize culture as we know it, and already has to some degree. This may very well be the biggest contribution the field of computing has on not just society, but the nature of our culture and civilization itself. Sounds grandiose, but just wait. We're in the initial stages, it's still gestating.
So, while this wasn't a terribly long and in depth paper, nor a technically detailed one, nor the definitive introduction to the topic (after all, I write it in all of maybe six hours, grand total), I did find some very interesting things along the way. The assignment asked that we review three journal articles, but I ended up doing five, and in the course of finding the five I wanted to use, I ended up at least skimming over two dozen articles from journals and conference proceedings from the ACM and the IEEE. I didn't consider myself an expert when I started (after all, that's why I chose it - to learn, not just regurgitate what I already know), nor am I one now, but I do think I'm better informed on the topic now, so I thought I'd share some of the interesting implementations, applications, and information on social networks that I found using open standards.
So, while this wasn't a terribly long and in depth paper, nor a technically detailed one, nor the definitive introduction to the topic (after all, I write it in all of maybe six hours, grand total), I did find some very interesting things along the way. The assignment asked that we review three journal articles, but I ended up doing five, and in the course of finding the five I wanted to use, I ended up at least skimming over two dozen articles from journals and conference proceedings from the ACM and the IEEE. I didn't consider myself an expert when I started (after all, that's why I chose it - to learn, not just regurgitate what I already know), nor am I one now, but I do think I'm better informed on the topic now, so I thought I'd share some of the interesting implementations, applications, and information on social networks that I found using open standards.
Before I get to the fun stuff, I'd like to clear up a probable
misconception, namely what I mean when I say "social network". I do not
mean things like Facebook, Orkut,
or (ugh) MySpace. What I mean is a much more abstract and conceptual
idea. Essentially, all a social network is, is a collection of nodes
(people) connected by relationships. A classroom is a social network -
each person is a node, connected by the relationship "classmate", and
all the "student nodes" are connected to the "professor node" by the
relationship "student", and so on. Your immediate family is a social
network, each person connected to the other by relationships such as
"sister" and "mother" or "uncle" and so on. Facebook and it's kin are
Social Networking Sites. They're just an implementation of software
that works on existing (and probably noticeably extends) social
networks. It's a fine line, but I hope I've made it a clear distinction.
So if I'm not talking about Facebook, what am I talking about? Well, let's start with something fairly basic: Friend-of-a-Friend. It's a file format that's a derivative of RDF, so it's very nicely structured, and describes relationships between people. Think of it as a machine-readable "profile page" from a social networking site, sort of, but instead of a friends list, you have entries that have URLs of your friends' FOAF pages.
Once we have this framework for describing a social network in a machine-readable way, we can start doing fun things with it. Things like movie recommendations (pdf), or calculating trust between users as a means to filter email (pdf). You can use it to describe a social network from an IRC channel. The list goes on, but you get the idea. It's worth mentioning here that none of this data would be as readily available if it wasn't a open format, easily accessed and well documented.
There is more to it, but by now you ought to have the gist of if, and a quick search on Google Scholar (as I've linked above) shows that research is ongoing in this area, so I'll let the papers and the researchers speak for themselves.
So if I'm not talking about Facebook, what am I talking about? Well, let's start with something fairly basic: Friend-of-a-Friend. It's a file format that's a derivative of RDF, so it's very nicely structured, and describes relationships between people. Think of it as a machine-readable "profile page" from a social networking site, sort of, but instead of a friends list, you have entries that have URLs of your friends' FOAF pages.
Once we have this framework for describing a social network in a machine-readable way, we can start doing fun things with it. Things like movie recommendations (pdf), or calculating trust between users as a means to filter email (pdf). You can use it to describe a social network from an IRC channel. The list goes on, but you get the idea. It's worth mentioning here that none of this data would be as readily available if it wasn't a open format, easily accessed and well documented.
There is more to it, but by now you ought to have the gist of if, and a quick search on Google Scholar (as I've linked above) shows that research is ongoing in this area, so I'll let the papers and the researchers speak for themselves.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Open Standards And Social Networks.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://xoti.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/3
I'm going to write some software that will socially connect you, as a user, to the websites you visit, and then to the websites your friends visit. I'll sell it to ad companies and make lots of...
...
*turns off cookies*