Multidimensional social network: Model and analysis

Abstract

A social network is an abstract concept consisting of set of people and relationships linking pairs of humans. A new multidimensional model, which covers three main dimensions: relation layer, time window and group, is proposed in the paper. These dimensions have a common set of nodes, typically, corresponding to human beings. Relation layers, in turn, reflect various relationship types extracted from different user activities gathered in computer systems. The time dimension corresponds to temporal variability of the social network. Social groups are extracted by means of clustering methods and group people who are close to each other. An atomic component of the multidimensional social network is a view - small social sub-network, which is in the intersection of all dimensions. A view describes the state of one social group, linked by one type of relationship (one layer), and derived from one time period. The multidimensional model of a social network is similar to a general concept of data warehouse, in which a fact corresponds to a view. Aggregation possibilities and usage of the model is also discussed in the paper. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.