Social Web Applications Research Articles

In users we trust: towards social user interactions based Trust Assertions for the Social Semantic Web

Current approaches for asserting trust focus on propagating known trust values amongst peers in a trusted network and do not provide measures for asserting a trust value from user interactions between peers. Moreover, Social Web applications assume that all users connected in one’s social graph share the same level of trust. These platforms do not provide any means to capture and differentiate trust levels amongst one’s connected peers. This makes it difficult for users to decide whom to trust and they have to rely on limited knowledge—their own or recommended by other peers. In this work, we present a trust framework for automatically asserting subjective trust values for connected users based on social user interactions—actions that provide users to interact with one another within a Social Network. In this work, we describe our model how we assert trust from these interactions. We also present our Trust Manager that automatically asserts user’s subjective trust values based on our model. These trust values help users to decide who is more trustworthy and with whom they can share their personal information.

Crowd explicit sentiment analysis

With the rapid growth of data generated by social web applications new paradigms in the generation of knowledge are opening. This paper introduces Crowd Explicit Sentiment Analysis (CESA) as an approach for sentiment analysis in social media environments. Similar to Explicit Semantic Analysis, microblog posts are indexed by a predefined collection of documents. In CESA, these documents are built up from common emotional expressions in social streams. In this way, texts are projected to feelings or emotions. This process is performed within a Latent Semantic Analysis. A few simple regular expressions (e.g. “I feel X”, considering X a term representing an emotion or feeling) are used to scratch the enormous flow of micro-blog posts to generate a textual representation of an emotional state with clear polarity value (e.g. angry, happy, sad, confident, etc.). In this way, new posts can be indexed by these feelings according to the distance to their textual representation. The approach is suitable in many scenarios dealing with social media publications and can be implemented in other languages with little effort. In particular, we have evaluated the system on Polarity Classification with both English and Spanish data sets. The results show that CESA is a valid solution for sentiment analysis and that similar approaches for model building from the continuous flow of posts could be exploited in other scenarios.

The zen of multidisciplinary team recommendation

It is often necessary to compose a team consisting of experts with diverse competencies to accomplish complex tasks. However, for its proper functioning, it is also preferable that a team be socially cohesive. A team recommendation system, which facilitates the search for potential team members, can be of great help both for (a) individuals who need to seek out collaborators and for (b) managers who need to build a team for some specific tasks. Such a decision support system that readily helps summarize multiple metrics indicating a team (and its members) quality, and possibly rank the teams in a personalized manner according to the end users' preferences, thus serves as a tool to cope with what would otherwise be an information avalanche. In this work, we present Social Web Application for Team Recommendation, a general‐purpose framework to compose various information retrieval and social graph mining and visualization subsystems together to build a composite team recommendation system, and instantiate it for a case study of academic teams.

Facebook in Foreign Language Teaching – A Tool to Improve Communication Competences

Facebook is a social media web application used by millions everyday. Students use it comfortably and frequently, as a means of genuine communication, mainly for keeping in touch with friends. Actually, we, as young adults, use Facebook as well, some of us extensively, as we acknowledge its excellent role in conveying verbal written messages and visuals. If Facebook is so good in promoting daily communication it should be also profitable in the school environment. Our research, which was developed with a group of students in French and another one in English, consists in creating a Facebook account for a foreign language class where digital “home assignments” are displayed. Our aim is to stimulate more involvement in the learning activity, mainly in the writing assignments. The research that started in the fall 2012 showed that Facebook has indeed a great potential as a means for teachers to reach to their students and experiment with learning methods. Students who had never written their homework before, started responding on Facebook to a variety of communicative assignments. Our conclusion is that since using Facebook the foreign language class has progressed towards an environment of genuine communication.

UEG: What is the Public Affairs Committee (PAC)?

UEG ‘Public Affairs’ is still quite loosely defined: if you take it easy, you might call it relations between UEG and public structures (political, economic, beneficial or by other ‘stakeholders’); if you look at it practically, UEG PAC may come into touch with everything from global organizational structures to every single individual (health care professional or patient) in Europe. UEG has taken it quite practically in the recent years. It is a pleasure for me to exemplify the UEG PAC activities with some successes, but also touch upon still unmet needs. If you are interested in further reading, www.ueg.eu is the place to follow us. For UEG, it was quite frustrating for many years that politicians of all levels (from European to local ones) did not really know what ‘Gastroenterology’ really means (‘What is the difference to Gastronomy?’). Five years ago, the PAC decided to take the bull by the horns and to enter into the spheres of the EU for explanation and subsequent action, choosing a topic of EU interest for at least ten years, namely cancer prevention by screening: obviously, we chose gastroenterology’s most expanding task, colorectal cancer screening (CRC SCR), as our carrier. With the help of a Brussels-based agency (EACON), we established many contacts with EU representatives in Parliament, Commission and Council and succeeded in autumn 2010 together with five very active EU Parliamentarians to have a Written Declaration on quality-controlled CRC SCR (http://www.ueg.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/News/WrittenDeclaratioon.68.2010.ENG.pdf ) and Primary Prevention of CRC signed by the majority of the EU Parliament. This action made UEG known as a strong and reliable partner in EU healthcare matters and had the consequence that it is now represented in a rapidly increasing number of EU institutions, such as the European Platform for Action against Cancer (EPAAC), the European Alcohol and Health Forum (EAHF), the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the Alliance for Biomedical Resarch in Europe and many others. The work of the UEG PAC has in the meantime become more diversified following the scientific and clinical interests of most of the 15 UEG ordinary member societies, supporting these by taking into account their special interests and needs at the EU levels, including their respective patient organizations. Actions addressed interventions from creating public awareness to improvement of healthcare structures and – not at least – to increase support for clinical and basic research. Every public activity has to be prepared, paralleled and followed-up by target directed information policies. The close collaboration between UEG PAC, UEG Secretariat and the contracted international press agency IMPRESSUM (Hamburg/D) has been successful on many levels. Press-services, edited in collaboration with the single UEG associations are sent out worldwide in the major global languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese) including worldwide monitoring of their impact. The website www.ueg.eu is amply consulted and delivers amongst many features the bi-weekly EU News – especially featuring EU research grant opportunities - which are read by more than 30% of the recipients. The UEG information outreach encompasses also international press-conferences during UEG Week, attracting about 80 national and international journalists, resulting in a surprising reporting in the medical and lay press all over the globe. Information to individual UEG members is mainly online and strongly supported by social media and web applications. Collaboration with the UEG Education Committee is close as well as with the 41 National Societies Member organisations that in a capillary way reach out to every gastroenterology and hepatology professional in the European and Mediterranean zone. UEG does most of its work for the purpose of improving the care for a multi-million crowd of patients, and has recently started to also be engaged for ‘patients-to-be’, taking initiatives in the field of primary prevention of diseases, an effort much appreciated in European health policy. This is done in cooperation with patient organizations, the respective UEG associations and the national societies and focuses on overweight, smoking, alcohol overuse and low physical activities. In parallel to economic, political and social developments of the world, also Gastroenterology has to go global. In recent years – with the initiative of the UEG PAC – traditional ties to the American Gastroenterology have been strengthened, joint congress events with the Asian-Pacific area have been started, and – finally – the first moves have been done to co-operate with the Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the emerging countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, a region where only global collaboration can repair what in very long periods of negligence has got out of control. Finally, that European Gastroenterology and Hepatology has become a ‘global player’ is clearly witnessed by the huge number of UEG Week participants from continents outside Europe, amounting to 32.8% in 2012.

A folksonomy-based lightweight resource annotation metadata schema for personalized hypermedia learning resource delivery

With the proliferation of social Web applications, users can now collaboratively author, share and access hypermedia learning resources, contributing to richer learning experiences outside formal education. These resources may or may not be educational. However, they can be harnessed for educational purposes by adapting and personalizing them to different learner needs. We propose to collaboratively annotate learning resources with a lightweight resource annotation metadata schema complemented by a folksonomy-derived semantic model. The annotation metadata schema follows a novel policy to associate numerical ratings to learners’ subjective expression of opinions on learning resources. On the other hand, the semantic model serves to support a collaborative resource recommendation algorithm based on the k-nearest neighbour approach. Proof-of-concept is demonstrated via a prototype Web-based recommender. Preliminary results indicate learners are confident with the recommended learning resources in terms of accuracy, usefulness, novelty and information adequacy. Formalization of folksonomy in annotating learning resources as well as in opinion mining from the crowd to rate resources may not only support personalization but also engage learners more effectively in technology-enhanced learning.

Sowing the Seeds: Towards Reaping a Harvest Using Social Web Applications in Nanyang Technological University Library

In this paper, we share why and how Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Library has explored and implemented Web 2.0 technologies extensively to reach out to our users using a range of social web tools such as blogs, share this widget, library toolbar and RSS feeds as well as online services like Facebook, Flickr, and Google Analytic. These digital library innovations have enabled us to meet the needs of our users more effectively and resulted in a tremendous growth in online visitorship.

Assessing dialogic communication through the Internet in Spanish museums

Dialogic communication is being boosted by the strong development of the social web. The web 2.0 is generating significant changes in the manner that organizations engage in dialogue with their publics, opening the way towards the interactive communication. In this way, web 2.0 tools will foster the dialogic communication between museums and their publics. Through them, the relationship between museums and publics is changing towards more interactive and collaborative forms.The objective of this article is to assess the level of dialogic communication developed by museums on the Internet, by analyzing the use of web platforms and social web applications as tools for dialogic communication by 120 museums in Spain. Two key aspects of communication between museums and publics using the Internet were identified to that end: content management and interaction management. These aspects enable a matrix which makes a distinction between the phases of evolution of the institutional web communication. The results obtained show that the museums studied are predominantly in a phase of monologic communication with their publics.

The Impact of Social Media in Review

Today, the impact of social media (SM) and social network services are undeniable. Social web applications are particularly so pervasive that finding innovative ways to incorporate them into our everyday lives for profit or educational use is a constant activity for some. The purpose of this study is to identify best practices acknowledged through scholarly literature for professionals and to highlight the common ways to improve the use of social web tools. Through a comprehensive literature review, this study illustrates how an effective communication synergy can be developed through the use of various social mediums for sustainable user engagement online.

From requirements to implementation of ad-hoc social Web applications: an empirical pattern-based approach

Social technologies are transforming the Web to a place where users actively contribute to content production and opinion making. At B2E level, enterprises look at social networking tools as possible means for improving their operations thanks to the unstructured interaction they foster among employees. This paper tackles the problem of defining a quick and pragmatic approach for specifying the requirements of ad-hoc social web applications and for going down to their implementation. The approach is motivated by the fact that in most cases the ad-hoc needs that the company foresees are just a peculiar subset of the large set of requirements that are addressed by current social platforms. The main contributions of this work include: the classification of the social interactions that can be observed in virtual communities in a comprehensive taxonomy of requirements (based on a broad analysis of the existing social networking platforms, considering both public and enterprise solutions); the definition of requirement specification as a selection process upon this taxonomy; and the mapping to design and implementation artifacts through automatic generation of design models and of running code. This is implemented through a set of pattern-based model transformations that transform the requirements (specified according to a goal-oriented methodology) to UML models and then to running Java code. A validation of the effectiveness of the approach is provided, in terms of percentage of hand-written code with respect to the parts that can be automatically obtained through the transformations.

Designing next-generation platforms for evaluating scientific output: what scientists can learn from the social web

Traditional pre-publication peer review of scientific output is a slow, inefficient, and unreliable process. Efforts to replace or supplement traditional evaluation models with open evaluation platforms that leverage advances in information technology are slowly gaining traction, but remain in the early stages of design and implementation. Here I discuss a number of considerations relevant to the development of such platforms. I focus particular attention on three core elements that next-generation evaluation platforms should strive to emphasize, including (1) open and transparent access to accumulated evaluation data, (2) personalized and highly customizable performance metrics, and (3) appropriate short-term incentivization of the userbase. Because all of these elements have already been successfully implemented on a large scale in hundreds of existing social web applications, I argue that development of new scientific evaluation platforms should proceed largely by adapting existing techniques rather than engineering entirely new evaluation mechanisms. Successful implementation of open evaluation platforms has the potential to substantially advance both the pace and the quality of scientific publication and evaluation, and the scientific community has a vested interest in shifting toward such models as soon as possible.

Recommendation in the Social Web

Recommender systems are a means of personalizing the presentation of information to ensure that users see the items most relevant to them. The social web has added new dimensions to the way people interact on the Internet, placing the emphasis on user-generated content. Users in social networks create photos, videos and other artifacts, collaborate with other users, socialize with their friends and share their opinions online. This outpouring of material has brought increased attention to recommender systems, as a means of managing this vast universe of content. At the same time, the diversity and complexity of the data has meant new challenges for researchers in recommendation. This article describes the nature of recommendation research in social web applications and provides some illustrative examples of current research directions and techniques. It is difficult to overstate the impact of the social web. This new breed of social applications is reshaping nearly every human activity from the way people watch movies to how they overthrow governments. Facebook allows its members to maintain friendships whether they live next door or on another continent. With Twitter, users from celebrities to ordinary folks can launch their 140 character messages out to a diverse horde of ‘‘followers.” Flickr and YouTube users upload their personal media to share with the world, while Wikipedia editors collaborate on the world’s largest encyclopedia.

Designing Next-Generation Platforms for Evaluating Scientific Output: What Scientists Can Learn from the Social Web

Traditional pre-publication peer review of scientific output is a slow, inefficient, and unreliable process. Efforts to replace or supplement traditional evaluation models with open evaluation platforms that leverage advances in information technology are slowly gaining traction, but remain in the early stages of design and implementation. Here I discuss a number of considerations relevant to the development of such platforms. I focus particular attention on three core elements that next-generation evaluation platforms should strive to emphasize, including (a) open and transparent access to accumulated evaluation data, (b) personalized and highly customizable performance metrics, and (c) appropriate short-term incentivization of the userbase. Because all of these elements have already been successfully implemented on a large scale in hundreds of existing social web applications, I argue that development of new scientific evaluation platforms should proceed largely by adapting existing techniques rather than engineering entirely new evaluation mechanisms. Successful implementation of open evaluation platforms has the potential to substantially advance both the pace and the quality of scientific publication and evaluation, and the scientific community has a vested interest in shifting towards such models as soon as possible.

A syntactical approach for interpersonal trust prediction in social web applications: Combining contextual and structural data

Studying the social phenomena within computer science and web environment, demands more attention in recent years. In this regard, trust is a crucial basis for social interactions among users in online environment specifically social web applications in which user participation is the primary driver of value. Predicting unknown trust relationship between users is a problem addressed in this paper, using data mining and classification approach. Achieving this, we provide a framework of social trust-inducing factors that contribute in trust formation process and then we investigate the role of these factors in predicting trust between users by the results of experimental study on real data from Epinions. The experimental evaluation reveals that the proposed framework is quite feasible and promising in predicting trust connectivity with a high degree of accuracy.

Contextualizing Experiences: Tracing the Relationships Between People and Technologies in the Social Web

This article uses both actor network theory (ANT) and activity theory to trace and analyze the ways in which both Twitter and third-party applications support the development and maintenance of meaningful contexts for Twitter participants. After situating context within the notion of a ‘‘fire space’’, the authors use ANT to trace the actors that support finding and moving information. Then they analyze the ‘‘prescriptions’’ of each application using the activity-theory distinction between actions and operations. Finally, they combine an activity-theory analysis with heuristics derived from the concept of ‘‘findability’’ in order to explore design implications for Social Web applications.

Enhancement of Medical Interns' Levels of Clinical Skills Competence and Self-Confidence Levels via Video iPods: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

BackgroundDesigning and delivering evidence-based medical practice for students requires careful consideration from medical science educators. Social Web (Web 2.0) applications are a part of today’s educational technology milieu; however, empirical research is lacking to support the impact of interactive Web 2.0 mobile applications on medical educational outcomes.ObjectivesThe aim of our study was to determine whether instructional videos provided by iPod regarding female and male urinary catheter insertion would increase students’ confidence levels and enhance skill competencies.MethodsWe conducted a prospective study with medical trainee intern (TI) participants: 10 control participants (no technological intervention) and 11 intervention participants (video iPods). Before taking part in a skills course, they completed a questionnaire regarding previous exposure to male and female urinary catheterization and their level of confidence in performing the skills. Directly following the questionnaire, medical faculty provided a 40-minute skills demonstration in the Advanced Clinical Skills Centre (ACSC) laboratory at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. All participants practiced the skills following the demonstrations and were immediately evaluated by the same faculty using an assessment rubric. Following the clinical skill evaluation, participants completed a postcourse questionnaire regarding skill confidence levels. At the end of the skills course, the intervention group were provided video iPods and viewed a male and a female urinary catheterization video during the next 3 consecutive months. The control group did not receive educational technology interventions during the 3-month period. At the end of 3 months, participants completed a follow-up questionnaire and a clinical assessment of urinary catheterization skills at the ACSC lab.ResultsThe results indicate a decline in skill competency over time among the control group for both male and female catheterizations, whereas the competency level was stable among the experimental group for both procedures. Interaction results for competency scores indicate a significant level by group and time (P = .03) and procedure and group (P = .02). The experimental group’s confidence level for performing the female catheterization procedure differed significantly over time (P < .001). Furthermore, confidence scores in performing female catheterizations increased for both groups over time. However, the confidence levels for both groups in performing the male catheterization decreased over time.ConclusionsVideo iPods offer a novel pedagogical approach to enhance medical students’ medical skill competencies and self-confidence levels. The outcomes illustrate a need for further investigation in order to generalize to the medical school population.

Evolution of trust networks in social web applications using supervised learning

Abstract Trust as a major part of human interactions plays an important role in addressing information overload, and helping users collect reliable information in SocialWeb applications. Although many researchers have already conducted comprehensive studies on the trust related online applications, the understanding of trust evolution is still unclear to the researchers. In this study, we move toward time-aware trust prediction in evolving online trust networks. Achieving this, we investigate the impact of considering the temporal evolution of trust networks explicitly in trust prediction tasks by using a supervised learning method. We incorporate the history information available on the trust relations (or links) of the current trust network state in prediction process. Our results unequivocally show that timestamps of past trust relations significantly improve the prediction accuracy of future trust relations.

Feedback in social semantic applications

This article examines the role of feedback mechanisms in social semantic web applications. It introduces different social semantic applications and the function that system feedback can play in these, although only a small portion of possible roles of feedback in such applications is addressed by the state of the art. The authors present an approach with four concrete feedback mechanisms and an experiment on the use of explicit feedback to foster user contribution and motivation. Finally, the article details the large number of open research questions in this area.

Decentralised social network management

Social networking sites have gained much popularity in the recent years because of the opportunities they give to people to connect to each other in an easy and timely manner, and to exchange and share various kinds of information. However, these sites are based on a centralised paradigm, which limits the mobility of their users, and ultimately, their chances to establish new relationships and benefit from diverse networking services. In this paper, we argue for a decentralised paradigm for social networking, in which users retain control of their profiles, and social networking sites focus on the delivery of innovative and competitive services. In this environment, both the social networking sites and their users will be able to develop to their full potential. This goal can be achieved by using a combination of semantic web technologies and tools, loosening the bind between the social network management and social networking web applications.

Sowing the seeds : towards reaping a harvest using social web applications in Nanyang Technological University Library

In this paper, we share why and how Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Library has explored and implemented Web 2.0 technologies extensively to reach out to our users using a range of social web tools such as blogs, share this widget, library toolbar and RSS feeds as well as online services like Facebook, Flickr, and Google Analytic. These digital library innovations have enabled us to meet the needs of our users more effectively and resulted in a tremendous growth in online visitorship.