Defined Networks
From SONIVIS:Wiki
| This article is work in progress. |
Contents |
Motivation
A wiki with all related activities forms a specific information space in a company. This information space consists of different networks. Based on a classification made by Carley[1], Wiki-specific networks can be arranged in four categories:
- social perspective (who knows who),
- knowledge perspective (who knows what),
- information perspective (what refers to what), and
- temporal perspective (what was done before).
Relationships in one network usually imply relationships in another[1]. Therefore, to understand all knowledge processes in a Wiki an analysis of these different network types is necessary.
Collaboration Network
The first group contains collaboration networks and discussion networks. Both types are social networks. A social network consists of persons as nodes and their relationships as edges. A collaboration network is used to investigate the nature and extend of collaboration between persons, also known as co-authorship network. In Wikis it is a network of authors of Wiki articles and enables the analysis of information exchange between communities. Collaboration is based on mutually referred asynchronous generated contributions in a knowledge process. In a collaboration network vertices are authors, whereas the edges are constructed on common edits of an article. Whenever two or multiple authors worked on the same article in a Wiki, they are connected to each other. The central assumption is that changes of different authors on an article imply collaboration. A strong tie exists, if two authors have contributed comparatively more then other authors (in terms of content) or they work often collaboratively on one or more articles (in terms of frequency). By analyzing collaboration networks the time component has a high impact because cooperation is possible over a long period. Consequently, the effect of aging on network structures has to be considered [1].
Additionally there are some parameters for containing the definition of a collaboration between two authors:
- visualize only collaborations created in a defined period
- visualize only collaborations existing in a specific category or structure
- visualize also authors without a collaboration (pending nodes)
- the maximum period between the changes of two authors for a collaboration
- the number of changes of two authors for a collaboration
- the size of the changes (e.g. the number of changed characters)
Wiki-Link Network
The information perspective defines information networks. In the Wiki context there are Wiki-linked networks, author-linked networks, and category networks. A Wiki-linked network consists of articles as vertices and Wiki-links as edges. It is a directed network since Wiki-links are not reciprocal. The temporal analysis of Wiki-linked networks enables the investigation of structural developments of themes in Wikis. The evolutionary process of emerging and "dying" topics is visible in this way. A structural analysis based on degree centrality shows highly connected areas in this network. Identifying topic clusters is another structural approach. Existing theme affiliations can be detected by text analysis.
