Guest editorial: social networks and social Web mining

Abstract

Nowadays the emergence of web-based communities and hosted services such as social networking sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, wikis – Wikipedia, microblogging Twitter and folksonomies – Delicious, Flickr and so on, brings in tremendous freedom of Web autonomy and facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. And along with the interactions between users and computers, social Web is rapidly becoming an important part of our digital experience, ranging from digital textual information to rich multimedia formats. Social networks have played an important role in different domains for about one decade, particularly involved in a broad range of social activities like user interaction, establishing friendship relationships, sharing and recommending resources, suggesting friends, creating groups and communities, commenting friend activities and opinions and so on. Recent years, has witnessed the rapid progress in the study of social networks for diverse applications, such as user profiling in Facebook and group recommendation via Flickr. These aspects and characteristics form the most active and challenging parts of Web 2.0. A large amount of challenges and opportunities have arisen with the propagation and popularity of new applications and technologies. A prominent challenge lies in modeling and mining this vast volume of data to extract, represent and exploit meaningful knowledge, and to leverage structures and dynamics of emerging social networks residing in the social Web, especially social media. Social networks and social Web mining combines data mining with social computing as a promising direction and offers unique opportunities for developing novel algorithms and tools ranging from text and content mining to link mining and community detection and so on. This special issue has gained overwhelming attention and received 52 submissions from researchers and practitioners working on social network analysis and social media mining. After initial examining of all submissions, 42 papers are selected into the regular rigorous review process and each submission has been reviewed by at least three reviewers. After 2–3 World Wide Web (2013) 16:541–544 DOI 10.1007/s11280-013-0254-0