Generic Vocabulary
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Generic vocabulary for social information spaces
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. The topology evolves and changes over time because it is a dynamic phenomenon.
Actors might have a human (e.g. person) or artificial (e.g. software) origin. They 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.
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. A content element can be part of a collection and then it is included in other content. It can be therefore grouped by specific structural elements such as categories or tags or by geographical information. Content elements are linked to each other by contextual relationships.
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 introduced item types and relation types are called information spaces items. Each item can be assigned with specific properties. Information spaces 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.
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, interaction network and context network. Depending on the explored social information space, different networks can be instantiated from these generic types.
