7,813 research outputs found
Gaming on and off the social graph: the social structure of Facebook games
Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of player-to-player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph
Mapping web personal learning environments
A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end usersâinteractions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE
Social Bootstrapping: How Pinterest and Last.fm Social Communities Benefit by Borrowing Links from Facebook
How does one develop a new online community that is highly engaging to each
user and promotes social interaction? A number of websites offer friend-finding
features that help users bootstrap social networks on the website by copying
links from an established network like Facebook or Twitter. This paper
quantifies the extent to which such social bootstrapping is effective in
enhancing a social experience of the website. First, we develop a stylised
analytical model that suggests that copying tends to produce a giant connected
component (i.e., a connected community) quickly and preserves properties such
as reciprocity and clustering, up to a linear multiplicative factor. Second, we
use data from two websites, Pinterest and Last.fm, to empirically compare the
subgraph of links copied from Facebook to links created natively. We find that
the copied subgraph has a giant component, higher reciprocity and clustering,
and confirm that the copied connections see higher social interactions.
However, the need for copying diminishes as users become more active and
influential. Such users tend to create links natively on the website, to users
who are more similar to them than their Facebook friends. Our findings give new
insights into understanding how bootstrapping from established social networks
can help engage new users by enhancing social interactivity.Comment: Proc. 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 201
Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management
An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks,
further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across
different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the
social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present
Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social
information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized
fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface
implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined
access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated
application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time,
low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of
Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog
Author Identifiers in Scholarly Repositories
Bibliometric and usage-based analyses and tools highlight the value of
information about scholarship contained within the network of authors, articles
and usage data. Less progress has been made on populating and using the author
side of this network than the article side, in part because of the difficulty
of unambiguously identifying authors. I briefly review a sample of author
identifier schemes, and consider use in scholarly repositories. I then describe
preliminary work at arXiv to implement public author identifiers, services
based on them, and plans to make this information useful beyond the boundaries
of arXiv.Comment: 10 pages. Based on a presentation given at Open Repositories 200
Semantic query languages for knowledge-based web services in a construction context
Since the early 2000s, different frameworks were set up to enable web-based collaboration in building projects. Unfortunately, none of these initiatives was granted a long life. Recently, however, the use of web technologies in the building industry has been gaining momentum again, considered some promising technologies for reaching a more interoperable BIM practice. Specifically, this relates to (1) Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies, and (2) cloud-based applications. In order to combine these into a network of interlinked applications and datastores, an agreed-upon mechanism for automatic communication and data retrieval needs to be used. Apart from the W3C standard SPARQL, often considered too high a threshold for developers to implement, there are some recent GraphQL-based solutions that simplify the querying process and its implementation into web services. In this paper, we review two recent open source technologies based on GraphQL, that enable to query Linked Data on the web: GraphQL-LD and HyperGraphQL
Semantics, sensors, and the social web: The live social semantics experiments
The Live Social Semantics is an innovative application that encourages and guides social networking between researchers at conferences and similar events. The application integrates data and technologies from the Semantic Web, online social networks, and a face-to-face contact sensing platform. It helps researchers to find like-minded and influential researchers, to identify and meet people in their community of practice, and to capture and later retrace their real-world networking activities at conferences. The application was successfully deployed at two international conferences, attracting more than 300 users in total. This paper describes this application, and discusses and evaluates the results of its two deployment
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