Generic Vocabulary
From SONIVIS:Wiki
| This article is work in progress. |
The Generic vocabulary for social information spaces is a theoretical model to describe the contents of social information spaces. It aims to be universally applicable to all sorts of social information spaces. It is the theory on which the SONIVIS:Data Model is based.
Contents |
Introduction
There are only a few general entities that make up social information spaces: acting entities and entities that are acted upon. These two types of entities may be interrelated either with an entity of the same type or of the other. All this happens on a temporal scale and may either be subdivided into smaller sub-spaces or combined to form super-spaces. With respect to these facts, Müller et al. [1] give the following definition of an information space.
Definition
An information space basically consists of a set of actors and a set of content elements. These basic items have specific properties, and they are connected. The types and patterns of relationships determine the final topology of a virtual space that defines the online production system. The topology evolves and changes over time because it is a dynamic phenomenon. The efficiency in online production systems is highly influenced by this topology. An information space to describe online production systems can be defined as:
where IB is the set of basic items and IR is the set of fundamental relations. The set of basic items IB = (A,CE) consists of the already introduced set of actors A and the set of content elements CE. The fundamental relations comprise possible connections between basic items. The phenomenon described here is dynamic, therefore a time period T, in which the information space is investigated, has to be specified. ISd refers to a set of additional contained information spaces, which may be empty. ISd allows to include further, different information spaces into an investigation.
Information space items
The above definition covers five distinct generic entities that will be referred to as, s.c., information space items. Two have been mentioned explicitly already, the basic items actor and content element. The three fundamental relations missing so far, are named actor-content element relation, context relation, and interaction relation. Each information space item can be assigned with specific properties.
Basic items
The term basic items groups the two solitary entities actor and content element. Both can basically exist stand-alone.
Actor
An acting item in a social information space is named Actor in the generic vocabulary. Actors might have a human (e.g. person) or artificial (e.g. software) origin. Furthermore, groups of actors and actor roles also belong into this category.
Content element
The second basic item -- content element -- refers to any kind of social media, such as text, image, music, and animation. Information (non-physical presence) and artifact (physical presence) are equally handled.
Fundamental relations
The category of fundamental relations is the umbrella term for all possible types of relations that can be drawn between two basic items.
Actor-content element relation
Actors and content elements form bidirectional actor-content element relationships: every content element in the information space is created or is assigned to at least one actor, while an actor has created or is assigned to multiple content elements. This information can be utilized to model which tasks an actor has carried out by using or changing which content element. A content-based and task-based perspective on social information spaces is therefore accomplished. The most important representatives of this type of relation are given by some standard operations that someone can do to data: create, read, update, and delete (a.k.a. CRUD operations).
Context relation
A connection between two content elements is generalized to a Context relation. A content element can be part of a collection and then it is included in other content. It can, therefore, be grouped by specific structural elements such as categories, tags or geographical information.
Interaction relation
Actors can be summarized in a group, for example, in order to assign an actor to a role or a certain organization. This organization is defined as affiliation and it is a conceptual characteristic of a person. Actors in one affiliation are connected with each other. They have a interactional relationship. Of course, there are different kinds of relationships conceivable such as collaboration, acquaintance, and communication.
Graph items
Information space items provide a connection between the data from an arbitrarily information space and the abstract graph representation. The latter assures the comparability of different graph definitions. Each information space item can be mapped to a, s.c., graph component, i.e., either a node or an edge.
Graph
In general, a graph in the Generic Vocabulary is defined [1] as
where the graph G consists of a set of vertices V and edges E with their assigned weight W in a certain period of time T.
An instance of a graph is a certain information space network type. The abstract graph items are utilized to describe generic networks that are specified using the previously described information space items. Referring the edge type, the derived networks are Actor-content element network GACE, Interaction network GI, and Context network GC. Depending on the explored social information space, different networks can be instantiated from these generic types.
Graph components
Graph components are the parts that make up a graph.
Node
Of course, a node in the generic vocabulary matches the concept of a vertex in a graph.
Edge
Between two nodes there might be an edge, either directed or undirected, weighted or unweighted.
Defined networks
For now, refer to Network types.
