Social Network

A Social Network is an information network composed of individuals or organizations connected through various social relationships (such as friendship, kinship, shared interests, or professional associations).

• AKA: Social Community.
• Context:
  • It can be represented by a Social Network Dataset.
  • It can represent a Social Group.
  • It can produce a Folksonomy.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • any Online Social Network, such as a LinkedIn Social Network (derived from the LinkedIn Service) or a facebook Social Network (derived from the Facebook Service).
  • A Co-Author Network, because the author's interacted.
  • a Personal Social Network, that is restricted a single person's links.
  • a User Trust Network.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Citation Network, because the relation is not a Social Relation.
  • a Social Network Model (which is a model - possibly an inaccurate model - of a Social Network).
• See: Directed Graph, Acquaintance Relationship, Collaboration Network, Friendship Network.

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References

2009

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
  • A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes," which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.
  • Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory about nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. The resulting graph-based structures are often very complex. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.
  • In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant nodes between all the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to measure social capital -- the value that an individual gets from the social network. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.
• http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
  • A social network is a set of social actors (e.g. people, organizations, communities, nations) and a set of social relationships (e.g. friendship/affect, communication, economic transactions, interactions, kinship, authority/hierarchy, trust, social support, diffusion, contagion, shared memberships) among them. Considering social relationships as a network calls attention in some manner (e.g. graphically, analytically) to the importance of the pattern or structure of the set of relationships.
  • A personal social network is the pattern of relationships among a set of actors who have a relationship to a particular focal person. A community social network is the pattern of relationships among a set of people and/or organizations in a community. Each of these networks can involve social support, provide people with a sense of community and lead them to help and protect each other.

2002

• (Girvan & Newman, 2002) ⇒ Michelle Girvan and M. E. J. Newman. (2002). “Community Structure in Social and Biological Networks.” In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 99(12). doi:10.1073/pnas.122653799
  • QUOTE: Many systems take the form of networks, sets of nodes or vertices joined together in pairs by links or edges (1). Examples include social networks (2–4) such as acquaintance networks (5) and collaboration networks (6), technological networks such as the Internet (7), the Worldwide Web (8, 9), and power grids (4, 5), and biological networks such as neural networks (4), food webs (10), and metabolic networks (11, 12). ... Consider for a moment the case of social networks — networks of friendships or other acquaintances between individuals.

2000

• (Amaral et al., 2000) ⇒ Amaral, LAN, Scala, A, Barthelemy, M, Stanley, HE. (2000). “[http://69.164.193.67/site_media/publication_pdfs/Amaral-2000-Proc.Natl.Acad.Sci.U.S.A.-97-11149.pdf Classes of Small-World Networks.” In: ProceedingsNatl. Acad. Sci. USA, 97.
  • QUOTE: Second, we consider three examples of ‘‘social’’ networks: (iii) the movie-actor network (2), the links in this network indicating that the two actors were cast at least once in the same movie; (iv) the acquaintance network of Mormons (25), the vertices being 43 Utah Mormons and the number of links the number of other Mormons they know; and (v) the friendship network of 417 Madison Junior High School students (26). These three examples describe apparently distinct types of social networks with very different sample sizes. In fact it can be argued that the network of movie-actor collaborations is not really a social network but is instead an economic network. However, because it was considered in other publications (1, 2, 5) as a social network, we classify it similarly here. We feel that the acquaintance and friendship networks may be better proxies of real social networks and, as such, expect similar results from the analysis of both networks.

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