The item below just came over the Technews e-wire from the Association for
Computing Machinery, a huge and powerful scholarly/practitioner org.
(BTW, look for my article about the internet as a social network in
Communications of ACM this April.)
Barry
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Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director
[log in to unmask] http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto
455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162
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"Social Networks"
Internet Computing (02/02) Vol. 6, No. 1, P. 91; Raghavan,
Prabhakar
Social network theory can be applied to the Internet, and has become
so significant that developers are incorporating it into the design
of search engines and enterprise portals. Web portals can be used
to model relationships between people, the Web pages they build and
access, and the interactions between them. In an adaptive ranking
model, the value of a document is raised by the frequency with which
it is accessed in previous searches. Role-based recommendation engines
incorporate the user's place and context in the company to make more
detailed and precise document suggestions. Meanwhile, the tendency of
users to converge into overlapping communities could be exploited by
portals, if they can outline groups that relate to the user's
context. The resulting system would then be able to locate the documents
or experts that have the closest contextual match. Overall, the Web will
continue to serve as a testing ground for social theory that can be
translated to enterprise information management, although the translation
is not seamless.
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