SocioPath: Bridging the gap between digital and social worlds

Abstract

Everyday, people use more and more digital resources (data, application systems, Internet, etc.) for all aspects of their life, like financial management, private exchanges, collaborative work, etc. This leads to non-negligible dependences on the digital distributed resources that reveal strong reliance at the social level. Users are often not aware of their real autonomy regarding the management of their digital resources. People underestimate social dependences generated by the system they use and the resulting potential risks. We argue that it is necessary to be aware of some key aspects of system's architectures to be able to know dependences. This work proposes SocioPath, a generic meta-model to derive dependences generated by system's architectures. It focuses on relations, like access, control, ownership among different entities of the system (digital resources, hardware, persons, etc.). Enriched with deduction rules and definitions, SocioPath reveals the dependence of a person on each entity in the system. This meta-model can be useful to evaluate a system, as a modeling tool that bridges the gap between the digital and the social worlds. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.