A generic model for a multidimensional temporal social network

Abstract

A comprehensive generic model for a multidimensional, temporal social network is proposed in the paper. It covers three main dimensions: layers, time windows and social groups. All the dimensions share the same set of nodes corresponding to social entities, usually individuals. Layers correspond to different types of relationships between humans, e.g. social and semantic, that can be derived from different human activities in IT systems; time windows reflect the temporal profile of the social network, whereas groups (social communities) are sets of similar humans. The intersection of all dimensions is called a view; it represents the statement of a single social cluster (group) with connections of only one type (from a single layer) and with the snapshot for a given period. Views can be aggregated by one, two or even all three dimensions simultaneously using filtering of dimension instances. Apart from description of the multidimensional model, its applicability is also considered in the paper. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.