Integration of Social Software Features Into Web Information Systems

}w !"#$%&'()+,-./012345<yA| FACULTY OF INFORMATICS MASARYK UNIVERSITY Integration of Social Software Features into Web Information Systems Tomáš Obšívač Ph.D. Thesis Proposal Brno, September 7, 2011 Advisor: doc. Ing. Michal Brandejs, CSc. Advisor’s signature 2 Contents 1 Introduction 5 2 State of the Art 7 2.1 Social Web Principles ......................... 7 2.1.1 Critical Mass ........................... 8 2.2 Web-based Information Systems ................... 9 2.2.1 Information System of Masaryk University . 9 2.3 Social Software .............................10 2.3.1 Social Network Services ....................10 2.3.2 Interpersonal Ties ........................11 2.4 Key Social Software Features .....................12 2.4.1 Social Translucence ......................12 2.4.2 Identity and Reputation ....................12 2.4.3 Relationships, Groups, Circles . 13 2.4.4 Authoring, Sharing and Conversations . 14 2.4.5 Tagging and Folksonomy ....................14 2.4.6 Social-aware Full Text Search . 15 2.4.7 Shared Workspacies ......................16 2.5 Network Science ............................16 2.5.1 Social Network Analysis ....................16 2.5.2 Link Mining (in Heterogeneous Networks) . 17 2.6 Recommendation Systems ......................18 3 Aims of the Thesis 19 3.1 Objectives and Expected Results ...................19 3.2 Schedule .................................20 4 Achieved Results 23 4.1 IS MU Social Applications .......................23 4.2 Academic Work .............................24 4.3 Other Results ..............................25 5 Author’s Publications 27 6 Summary / Souhrn 29 6.1 Summary .................................29 6.2 Souhrn ..................................29 7 References 30 3 4 1 Introduction The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. ... The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our web-like existence in the world. — Sir Tim Berners-Lee, [BL99] From a global point of view, there is no doubt that the Web is behind many advancements in economic, social and business models. During the last two decades of the existence of the Web, we have seen hardly paralleled events unimaginable without the Web. For example the dot-com bubble1 and recent fall of authoritarian regimes of Middle East. The former event is seen by many as warning against too much techno-optimism. I would recommend to see it as exact part of the hype cycle, before the new technology and its benefits is well understood and adopted to the production. The later event is a recent example of the power unleashed by the use of the Web, or specifically Social Network Services. Power to overcome distances, to encourage free communication and to support civil society (including academia), communities and collaboration. Active participation of the Web users—not only passive web page read- ing by consumers—was original intention of the Web design [Law05]. Sur- prisingly, it took more than 10 years until such behavior has been per- ceived. The Social Web has been promoted since then as a key part of the Social Web “next version of the Web”, slightly confusingly named as Web 2.0.2 Web 2.0 represents not a change in the technology, but the fundamen- tal change in the people involvement. Web is becoming truly participatory social media capable of interactive continuous dialogue, which was impos- sible on the previous form of the Web, i.e. one-to-many mass media and one-way information source. Humans are social beings, thus the emer- gence of the Social Web is simply our online world catching up with our offline world [Ada10]. The aim of my thesis is to apply as many general principles of the So- cial Web (chapter 2.1) as possible in a smaller-scale intranet applications and enterprise-level Web-based Information Systems (chapter 2.2). With those principles in mind, when properly implemented by state-of-the-art computer science techniques, it is possible to build efficient ways to con- nect people and potentially interesting information (chapter 2.6). It is also possible to gain previously unseen knowledge (chapter 2.5) interesting for example for the management to support work or learning engagement. I consider social software features to be the strategic information system components for improving the quality of services for users. An information system built around people and enhanced by the social software 1 Measured by NASDAQ Composite index, dot-com bubble burst is responsible for fall from over 5000 points in March 2000 to under 2000 points one year later. Measured by market value, stock market crash caused the loss of 5 trillion USD in two years. 2Widely known Web 2.0 promotion is O’Reilly Media 2004 conference, which accented it as a business revolution. The term Web 2.0 has been used since 1999, mainly in con- junction with web sites design and development towards rich internet applications and to describe the Web as a platform. 5 features (chapter 2.4) should perform better in its main purpose to improve effectiveness and efficiency within the organization. It should also better support sharing and preservation of knowledge (chapter 2.4.7) which is of crucial importance to organizations or businesses [For10] in the modern Network Society3 and the Service Economy. Many broad business goals, like increased knowledge sharing, better access to expertise, and increased innovation, are uniquely served by social technologies. Early proof-of-concept efforts and pilots have proven successful in supporting these endeavors. — Forrester Consulting, 2010 [For10] Experimental implementation of social features, yet fully functional and adopted by a number of users, has been done at Information system of Masaryk University (IS MU). Features (chapter 4.1) have been rolled out gradually for several years now. Apart from that, a need of their measurement have arisen. My future effort will be put to evaluate an impact on the user behavior and the system usage to validate and improve the experimental implementation. There is a need of further investigation of relations among users and other objects managed by the system (chapter 2.5.1). Subsequent heterogeneous network data mining (chapter 2.5.2) from socially-enhanced applications are subject of my further research. My recent successful attempt presented in [BBG+11] confirms, that we can await new and valuable insights into the data acquired. 3“The network society itself is, in fact, the social structure which is characteristic of what people had been calling for years the information society or post-industrial society. It is a society where the key social structures and activities are organized around electron- ically processed information networks.” — Conversation with M. Castells, UC Berkeley, 2008 6 2 State of the Art 2.1 Social Web Principles A brief description of main attributes of the Web as a participation platform: User generated content The role of producers and consumers in the digital age blurs, inducing rise of prosumer capitalism [RJ10]. Especially prosumer for digital natives, i.e. those interacting with digital technology from an early age, online reputation and the exposure is a culture, where “getting noticed is everything”. They create a non-monetary form of economy at the Long Tail ending [And06]. Users not only add value by contributing, they may be the application alone.4 The power of the crowd There are at least two reasons why we do not need to chase an expert: The aggregation of information in groups (with some conditions5) results in decisions that are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group [Sur04]. crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing is the outsourcing through an open call to an undefined large community. According to Jeff Howe, author of the term, crowdsourcing employs those who are most fit to perform tasks, solve complex prob- lems and contribute with the most relevant and fresh ideas. The online crowdsourcing market place Amazon Mechanical Turk or question-and- answer websites, e.g. Yahoo! Answers and Quora, belong among the web services helping mediate crowdsourcing. Data on large scale Success of majority of Social Web services is in the ability to extract knowledge from user generated data and the way of service is used. It is essential for such application to continuously collect information indirectly from the user each time he or she uses it. The architecture of participation This term was used by Tim O’Reilly [O’R04] to describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contri- bution, for reuse and mash up or to rate system content, with low barriers to entry of newcomers. His examples were open source, The Comprehen- sive Perl Archive Network, The Open Directory Project or Wikipedia. 4“Today [June 2004], upwards of 430,000 people in the U.S. alone—more than are em- ployed worldwide by General Electric Co. and Procter & Gamble combined—earn a full- or part-time living on eBay selling everything from fashion to farm equipment, with the highest-sellers grossing up to $1 million a month.” — The Rise Of The Mompreneurs, Businessweek 5 “Wise crowds” conform to the following conditions: diversity of group members opinion, each member have independent opinion, decentralization allows specialized members with local knowledge and aggregation is possible by a mechanism of turning private judge- ments into a collective decision. 7 Figure 1: Original 35mm slide used by Metcalfe to support the future value of the network based on the Ethernet, a wired communication network protocol. [Hir06] Network effect Product or service becomes more valuable the more people use it (a discussion of this fact is in the following chapter). Furthermore, the value of Web 2.0 service is built as a side-effect of the ordinary use of the application [O’R05]. It is created by the aggregation of many individual user contributions. Openness Openness on the Web is about technological aspects, like data and applications portability, data feed formats and application program- ming interfaces, which allow to combine data and services in order to cre- mashup ate a new application, so called mashup.

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