Visualising social networks in collaborative environments

Abstract

Social networking and other Web 2.0 applications are becoming ever more popular, with a staggering growth in the number of users and the amount of data they produce. This trend brings new challenges to the Web engineering community, particularly with regard to how we can help users make sense of all this new data. The success of collaborative work and learning environments will increasingly depend on how well they support users in integrating the data that describes the social aspects of the task and its context. This chapter explores the concept of social networking in a collaboration environment, and presents a simple strategy for developers who wish to provide visualisation functionalities as part of their own application. As an explanatory case study, we describe the development of a social network visualisation (SNV) tool, using software components and data publicly available. The SNV tool is designed to support users of a collaborative application by facilitating the exploration of interactions from a network perspective. Since social networks can be large and complex, graph theory is commonly used as a mathematical framework. Our SNV tool integrates techniques from social networking and graph theory, including the filtering and clustering of data, in this case, from a large email dataset. These functions help to facilitate the analysis of the social network and reveal the embedded patterns of user behaviour in the underlying data. © 2010, IGI Global.