Knowledge Management,

Semantic Web and

Social Networking
Social Networks

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham

June 2010
 What are Social Networks
 Social Network Views: Science, Technology, Culture
 Social Network Concepts
 Social Networks and Knowledge Management
 Social Networks and Semantic Web
 Applications
 Directions
 References:
 ce.sharif.edu/~m_jamali/resources/WI06_SNA.ppt (WI 2006)
 ic.ucsc.edu/~wsack/fdm20c/fall2008/Lectures/social-networks.ppt
 A social network site allows people who share interests to build a
‘trusted’ network/ online community. A social network site will
usually provide various ways for users to interact, such as IM
(chat/ instant messaging), email, video sharing, file sharing,
blogging, discussion groups, etc.

 The main types of social networking sites have a ‘theme’, they

allow users to connect through image or video collections online
(like Flicker or You Tube) or music (like My Space, lastfm). Most
contain libraries/ directories of some categories, such as former
classmates, old work colleagues, and so on (like Face book,
friends reunited, Linked in, etc). They provide a means to connect
with friends (by allowing users to create a detailed profile page),
and recommender systems linked to trust.
 Face book - A social networking website. Initially the membership was restricted
to students of Harvard University. It was originally based on what first-year
students were given called the “face book” which was a way to get to know other
students on campus. As of July 2007, there over 34 million active members
worldwide. From September 2006 to September 2007 it increased its ranking from
60 to 6th most visited web site, and was the number one site for photos in the
United States.
 Twitter- A free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to
send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant
messaging, email, to the Twitter website, or an application/ widget within a space
of your choice, like MySpace, Facebook, a blog, an RSS Aggregator/reader.
 My Space - A popular social networking website offering an interactive, user-
submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and
videos internationally. According to AlexaInternet, MySpace is currently the
world’s sixth most popular English-language website and the sixth most popular
website in any language, and the third most popular website in the United States,
though it has topped the chart on various weeks. As of September 7, 2007, there
are over 200 million accounts.
 social network analysis is an interdisciplinary social science;
 Sociologists, computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians have made
large contributions to understanding networks in general (as graphs) and thus
contributed to an understanding of social networks
 [Social network analysis] is grounded in the observation that social actors [i.e.,
people] are interdependent and that the links [i.e., relationships] among them
have important consequences for every individual [and for all of the individuals
together]. ... [Relationships] provide individuals with opportunities and, at the
same time, potential constraints on their behavior. ... Social network analysis
involves theorizing, model building and empirical research focused on
uncovering the patterning of links among actors. It is concerned also with
uncovering the antecedents and consequences of recurrent patterns. (from
Linton C. Freeman)
 “Sociograms” were invented in 1933 by Moreno.
 In a sociogram, the actors are represented as points in a two-dimensional space.
The location of each actor is significant. E.g. a “central actor” is plotted in the
center, and others are placed in concentric rings according to “distance” from this
actor.
 Actors are joined with lines representing ties, as in a social network. In other words
a social network is a graph, and a sociogram is a particular 2D embedding of it.
 These days, sociograms are rarely used (most examples on the web are not
sociograms at all, but networks). But methods like MDS (Multi-Dimensional
Scaling) can be used to lay out Actors, given a vector of attributes about them.
 Social Networks were studied early by researchers in graph theory (Harary et al.
1950s). Some social network properties can be computed directly from the graph.
 Others depend on an adjacency matrix representation (Actors index rows and
columns of a matrix, matrix elements represent the tie strength between them).
 email, newsgroups, and weblogs
 search engines: e.g., Google (http://google.com)
 Google’s Page Rank algorithm gives more weight to popular
webpages.
 A webpage is considered popular if many other webpages link
to it.
 collaborative filtering and/or recommender systems; e.g.,
amazon.com’s feature: “People who bought this book
also bought...”
 What is Your Network?
When your connections invite their connections, your Network starts to grow.
Your Network is your connections, their connections, and so on out from you at
the center.

 How do you classify users?

Your Network contains professionals out to “three degrees” — that is, friends-
of-friends-of-friends. If each person had 10 connections (and some have many
more) then your network would contain 10,000 professionals.

How do you see who is in your Network?

 LinkedIn lets you see your network as one large group of searchable
professional profiles.
 e.g., six degrees of kevin bacon
 bacon number: definition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bac
on
 kevin bacon has a bacon number of 0

 an actor, A, has a bacon number of 1 if s/he appeared

in a movie with kevin bacon
 an actor, B, has a bacon number of 2 if s/he appear in a
movie with A
 . social software; e.g., facebook, friendster, orkut,
 A structural approach to understanding
social interaction.
 Networks consist of Actors and the Ties
between them.
 We represent social networks
as graphs whose vertices are
the actors and whose edges
are the ties.
 Edges are usually weighted to
show the strength of the tie.
 In the simplest networks, an Actor is an
individual person.
 A tie might be “is acquainted with”. Or
it might represent the amount of email
exchanged between persons A and B.
 Effects of urbanization on individual well-
being
 World political and economic system
 Community elite decision-making
 Social support, Group problem solving
 Diffusion and adoption of innovations
 Belief systems, Social influence
 Markets, Sociology of science
 Exchange and power
 Email, Instant messaging, Newsgroups
 Co-authorship, Citation, Co-citation
 SocNet software, Friendster
 Blogs and diaries, Blog quotes and links
 Balance: important in exchange networks
 In a two-person network (dyad), exchange of goods, services and cash
should be balanced.
 More generally, exchanges of “favors” or “support” are likely to be quite
balanced.
 Role: what role does the actor perform in the network?
 Role is defined in terms of Actors’ neighborhoods.
 The neighborhood is the set of ties and actors connected directly to the
current actor.
 Actors with similar or identical neighborhoods are assigned the same role.
 What is the related idea from semiotics?
 Paradigm: interchangability. Actors with the same role are
interchangable in the network.
 Prestige: How important is the actor in the network?
 Related notions are status and centrality.
 Centrality reifies the notion of “peripheral vs. central
participation” from communities of practice.
 Key notions of centrality were developed in the 1970’s, e.g.
“eigenvalue centrality” by Bonacich.
 Most of these measures were rediscovered as quality measures
for web pages:
 Indegree
 Pagerank = eigenvalue centrality
 HITS ?= two-mode eigenvalue centrality
 Actor
 An “actor” is a basic component for SNs. Actors can be:
 Individual people, Corporations, Nation-States, Social groups
 Modes
 If all the actors are of the same type, the network is called a one-mode
network. If there are two groups of actor then it is a two-mode
network.
 E.g. an affiliation network is a two-mode network. One mode is
individuals, the other is groups to which they belong. Ties represent
the relation: person A is a member of group B.
 Ties
 A tie is the relation between two actors. Common types of ties include:
 Friendship, Amount of communication, Goods exchanged, Familial
relation (kinship), Institutional relations
 Because human relations are rich and unbounded, drawing meaningful
boundaries for network analysis is a challenge.
 There are two main approaches:
 Realist: boundaries perceived by actors themselves, e.g. gang
members or ACM members.
 Nominalist: Boundaries created by researcher: e.g. people who
publish in ACM CHI.
 To deal with large networks, sampling is necessary. Unfortunately,
randomly sampled graphs will typically have completely different
structure. Why?
 One approach to this is “snowballing”. You start with a random
sample. Then extend with all actors connected by a tie. Then extend
with all actors connected to the previous set by a tie…
 Social networks are formed between Web pages by
hyperlinking to other Web pages.
 A hyperlink is usually an explicit indicator that one Web
page author believes that another page is related or relevant.
 The possibility to publish and gather personal information, a
major factor in the success of the Web
 Two Major Tasks
 Social Network Extraction from the Web
 Social Network Analysis
 Social Networking Services (SNS).
 Friendster; Orkut
 Bibliographic Metrics
 bibliographic coupling
 co-citation coupling
 Weblogs have become prominent social media on the
Internet that enable users to quickly and easily
publish content including highly personal thoughts.

 Bloggers might list one another’s blogs in a Blogroll

and might read, link to a post, or comment on other
blogs’ posts (A post is the smallest part of a blog
which has some contents and readers can comment on
it. A post also has a date of publish).
 Semantic Web: having data on the Web defined and
linked in a way that it can be used by people and
processed by machines in a ”wide variety of new and
exciting applications”
 SW and SN models support each other:
 Semantic Web enables online and explicitly represented social
information
 social networks, especially trust networks, provide a new
paradigm for knowledge management in which users
”outsource” knowledge and beliefs via their social networks
 Drawbacks to Centralized Social Networks
 the information is under the control of the database owner
 centralized systems do not allow users to control the information they
provide on their own terms
 The friend-of-a-friend(FOAF) project is a first attempt at a formal,
machine processable representation of user profiles and friendship
networks.
 The Swoogle Ontology Dictionary shows that the class foaf:Person
currently has nearly one million instances spread over about 45,000 Web
documents.
 The FOAF ontology is not the only one used to publish social information
on the Web.
 For example, Swoogle identifies more than 360 RDFS or OWL classes
defined with the local name ”person”.
 Knowledge representation.
 Small number of common ontologies
 Knowledge management.
 efficient and effective mechanisms for accessing knowledge,
especially social networks, on the Semantic Web
 Social network extraction, integration and analysis
 extracting social networks correctly from the noisy and
incomplete knowledge on the (Semantic) Web
 Provenance and trust aware distributed inference.
 manage and reduce the complexity of distributed inference by
utilizing provenance of knowledge
 Why Social Networks in
KMS?

People

KM
Organization
Technology
Processes

Knowledge Management involves people, technology, and processes in

Overlapping parts.
 Why are we studying
Social Networks ? Social
Networks

What ties Information Architecture,

Knowledge Management and
Social Network Analysis more
Knowledge
closely together is the reciprocal Information
Architecture
Management
Systems
relationship between people and
content.
 Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of
relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations,
computers or other information/knowledge processing entities.

 The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links
show relationships or flows between the nodes.
 We measure Social Network in terms of:
1. Degree Centrality:
The number of direct connections a node has. What really matters is where
those connections lead to and how they connect the otherwise unconnected.
2. Betweenness Centrality:
A node with high betweenness has great influence over what flows in the
network indicating important links and single point of failure.
3. Closeness Centrality:
The measure of closeness of a node which are close to everyone else.
The pattern of the direct and indirect ties allows the nodes any other node in the
network more quickly than anyone else. They have the shortest paths to all others.

Application of SNA: Building the 9/11 Al- Qaeda Network.

 Reduce Complexity
 Geo-social networks
 Integrating concepts from semantic web, social network, and
knowledge management
 Geo-social semantic web
 Visualizing social networks
 Security and Privacy
 Mining and analysis of social networks
 Predicting what the memebrs would do next
 Social Networks
 Social Networks and 9/11 Terrorists
 Social Networks and Baseball Drug Use
 Social Networks and Expert Finder
 A social network site allows people who share interests to build a ‘trusted’
network/ online community. A social network site will usually provide
various ways for users to interact, such as IM (chat/ instant messaging),
email, video sharing, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, etc.

 The main types of social networking sites have a ‘theme’, they allow
users to connect through image or video collections online (like Flicker or
You Tube) or music (like My Space, lastfm). Most contain libraries/
directories of some categories, such as former classmates, old work
colleagues, and so on (like Face book, friends reunited, Linked in, etc).
They provide a means to connect with friends (by allowing users to create
a detailed profile page), and recommender systems linked to trust.
Early in 2000, the CIA was informed of two terrorist suspects linked to al-Qaeda.
Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were photographed attending a meeting of
known terrorists in Malaysia. After the meeting they returned to Los Angeles,
where they had
already set up residence in late 1999.
What do you do with these suspects? Arrest or deport them immediately?
No, we need to use them to discover more of the al-Qaeda network.

Once suspects have been discovered, we can use their daily activities to
uncloak their network. Just like they used our technology against us, we
can use their planning process against them. Watch them, and listen to
their conversations to see...

•who they call / email

•who visits with them locally and in other cities
•where their money comes from

The structure of their extended network begins to emerge as data is

discovered via surveillance.
A suspect being monitored may have many contacts -- both accidental and intentional. We must
always be wary of 'guilt by association'. Accidental contacts, like the mail delivery person, the
grocery store clerk, and neighbor may not be viewed with investigative interest.

Intentional contacts are like the late afternoon visitor, whose car license plate is traced back to a
rental company at the airport, where we discover he arrived from Toronto (got to notify the
Canadians) and his name matches a cell phone number (with a Buffalo, NY area code) that our
suspect calls regularly. This intentional contact is added to our map and we start tracking his
interactions -- where do they lead? As data comes in, a picture of the terrorist organization slowly
comes into focus.

How do investigators know whether they are on to something big? Often they don't. Yet in this case
there was another strong clue that Alhazmi and Almihdhar were up to no good -- the attack on the
USS Cole in October of 2000. One of the chief suspects in the Cole bombing [Khallad] was also
present [along with Alhazmi and Almihdhar] at the terrorist meeting in Malaysia in January 2000.

Once we have their direct links, the next step is to find their indirect ties -- the 'connections of their
connections'. Discovering the nodes and links within two steps of the suspects usually starts to
reveal much about their network. Key individuals in the local network begin to stand out. In viewing
the network map in Figure 2, most of us will focus on Mohammed Atta because we now know his
history. The investigator uncloaking this network would not be aware of Atta's eventual importance.
At this point he is just another node to be investigated.
Figure 2 shows the two suspects and
 Figure 2 shows the two suspects and
e to be investigated.

                                                                                                                         
We now have enough data for two key conclusions:
• All 19 hijackers were within 2 steps of the two original suspects uncovered in 2000!
• Social network metrics reveal Mohammed Atta emerging as the local leader

With hindsight, we have now mapped enough of the 9-11 conspiracy to stop it. Again, the
investigators are never sure they have uncovered enough information while they are in the
process of uncloaking the covert organization. They also have to contend with superfluous
data. This data was gathered after the event, so the investigators knew exactly what to look
for. Before an event it is not so easy.

As the network structure emerges, a key dynamic that needs to be closely monitored is the activity
within the network. Network activity spikes when a planned event approaches. Is there an
increase of flow across known links? Are new links rapidly emerging between known nodes?
Are money flows suddenly going in the opposite direction? When activity reaches a certain
pattern and threshold, it is time to stop monitoring the network, and time to start removing
nodes.

The author argues that this bottom-up approach of uncloaking a network is more effective than a top
down search for the terrorist needle in the public haystack -- and it is less invasive of the
general population, resulting in far fewer "false positives".
Figure 2 shows the two suspects and

When the Mitchell Report on steroid use in Major League Baseball [MLB], was published, people were surprised at
who and how many players were mentioned. The diagram below shows a human network created from data found in
the Mitchell Report. Baseball players are shown as green nodes. Those who were found to be providers of steroids
and other illegal performance enhancing substances appear as red nodes. The links reveal the flow of chemicals --
from provider to player.
 Managing the 21st Century Organization
 Networks of Adaptive/Agile Organizations
 Best Practice: Organizational Network Mapping
 Discovering Communities of Practice
 Data-Mining E-mail
 Finding Leaders on your Team
 Post-Merger Integration
 Knowledge Sharing in Organizations
 Innovation happens at the Intersections
 Partnerships and Alliances in Industry
 Decision-Making in Organizations
 New Organizational Structures
Figure 2 shows the two suspects and

Organizational leaders are preparing for the potential loss of expertise and knowledge flow due to
turnover, downsizing, outsourcing, and the coming retirements of the baby boom generation. The
model network (previous chart) is used to illustrate the knowledge continuity analysis process.

Each node in this sample network (previous chart) represents a person that works in a knowledge
domain. Some people have more / different knowledge than others. Employees who will retire in 2
years or less have their nodes colored red. Those who will retire in 3-4 years are colored yellow.
Those retiring in 5 years or later are colored green.

A gray, directed line is drawn from the seeker of knowledge to the source of expertise. A-->B
indicates that A seeks expertise / advice from B. Those with many arrows pointing to them are
sought often for assistance.

The top subject matter experts -- SMEs -- in this group are nodes 29, 46, 100, 41, 36 and 55.
The SMEs were discovered using a network metric in InFlow that is similar to how the
Google search engine ranks web pages -- using both direct and indirect links.

Of the top six SMEs in this group, half are colored red[100] or yellow[46, 55]. The loss of person 46
has the greatest potential for knowledge loss. 90% of the network is within
3 steps of accessing this key knowledge source.
Figure 2 shows the two suspects and
 Detecting coalitions and subgroups
 Conducting a political campaign
 Marketing a drug by a pharmaceutical company
 Forming a travel network
 Many more - - - - -
 Introduction to Social Networks
 Properties of Social Networks
 Social Network Analysis Basics
 Examples
 Data Privacy Basics
 Privacy and Social Networks
 Social networks have important implications for our daily
lives.
 Spread of Information
 Spread of Disease
 Economics
 Marketing

 Social network analysis could be used for many activities

related to information and security informatics.
 Terrorist network analysis
* http://jheer.org/enron/
 Social network data is represented a graph
 Individuals are represented as nodes
 Nodes may have attributes to represent personal traits
 Relationships are represented as edges
 Edges may have attributes to represent relationship types
 Edges may be directed
 Common Social Network Mining tasks
 Node classification
 Link Prediction
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Graph represented by a set of homogenous

vertices and a set of homogenous edges
 Each node also has a set of Details, one of which
is considered private.
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Collection of techniques that use node attributes

and the link structure to refine classifications.
 Uses local classifiers to establish a set of priors
for each node
 Uses traditional relational classifiers as the
iterative step in classification
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Class Distribution Relational Neighbor

 Weighted-Vote Relational Neighbor
 Network-only Bayes Classifier
 Network-only Link-based Classification
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 167,000 profiles from the Facebook online

social network
 Restricted to public profiles in the
Dallas/Fort Worth network
 Over 3 million links
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

Diameter of the largest component 16

Number of nodes 167,390
Number of friendship links 3,342,009
Total number of listed traits 4,493,436
Total number of unique traits 110,407
Number of components 18
Probability Liberal .45
Probability Conservative .55
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Details only: Uses Naïve Bayes classifier to

predict attribute
 Links Only: Uses only the link structure to
predict attribute
 Average: Classifies based on an average of the
probabilities computed by Details and Links
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Attempt to predict the value of the political

affiliation attribute
 Three Inference Methods used as the local
classifier
 Relaxation labeling used as the Collective
Inference method
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Ensures that no ‘false’ information is added

to the network, all details in the released
graph were entered by the user
 Details that have the highest global
probability of indicating political affiliation
removed from the network
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Ensures that the link structure of the

released graph is a subset of the original
graph
 Removes links from each node that are the
most like the current node
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

Trait Name Trait Value Weight Liberal

Group legalize same sex marriage 46.16066789

Group every time i find out a cute 39.68599463

boy is conservative a little
part of me dies
Group equal rights for gays 33.83786875
Group the democratic party 32.12011605
Group not a bush fan 31.95260895
Group people who cannot 30.80812425
understand people who
voted for bush
Group government religion 29.98977927
disaster
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

Trait Name Trait Value Weight Conservative

Group george w bush is my 45.88831329
homeboy
Group college republicans 40.51122488
Group texas conservatives 32.23171423
Group bears for bush 30.86484689
Group kerry is a fairy 28.50250433
Group aggie republicans 27.64720818
Group keep facebook clean 23.653477
Group i voted for bush 23.43173116
Group protect marriage one man 21.60830487
one woman
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

Trait Name Trait Value Weight Liberal

activities amnesty international 4.659100601
Employer hot topic 2.753844959
favorite tv shows queer as folk 9.762900035
grad school computer science 1.698146579
hometown mumbai 3.566007713
Relationship Status in an open relationship 1.617950632
religious views agnostic 3.15756412
looking for whatever i can get 1.703651985
 Lindamood et al. 09 &
Heatherly et al. 09

 Conducted on 35,000 nodes which recorded

political affiliation
 Tests removing 0 details and 0 links, 10 details
and 0 links, 0 details and 10 links, and 10 details
and 10 links
 Varied Training Set size from 10% of available
nodes to 90%
 Results are documented in papers