An interest-oriented network evolution mechanism for online communities

Abstract

Online communities involve lots of interactions among members. Those interactions are usually shown as "friend links" between community members, and an online community could be seen as a network of members. The structures and properties of community network formed are important to the information diffusion in communities. Hence, the network formation mechanisms attract great interest in recent years. In this paper, an interest-oriented network evolution mechanism is proposed to study the growth and evolution of social network of online communities. Agents in an online community tend to choose those who share similar interests with them to be their friends. In our model, we define n different interest categories; they could refer to sports, movies, music, literatures and so on. Each agent has an interest vector (V1, V2,..., Vn) to indicate its interests. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.