Social Networking for Scientists (Research

Communities) Using Tagging and Shared Bookmarks: a

Web 2.0 ApplicationMarlon Pierce, Geoffrey Fox, Joshua Rosen, Siddharth

Maini, and Jong Youl Choi

Community Grids Lab, Indiana University

Collaborative Technologies and Systems, 2008

AbstractReport their investigation and implementationo Creating communities of researchers

Motivation is to provide outreach tools that broaden the participation of these groups in funded research activities

IntroductionEnabling researchers to find both useful online

resources and also potential collaborators on future research projects

MSI-CIEC is an NSF funded project to engage researchers at minority-serving institutions in modern cyberinfrastructureo “Minority Serving Institution-Cyberinfrastructure

Empowerment Consortium”

The MSI-CIEC social networking Web portal combines social bookmarking and tagging with online curricula vitae profiles

Enable MSI researchers to find others with similar research interests

Tag Clouds

Click-Taggable Grants.gov RSS Feed

Click a tag and see all associated links.

CapabilitiesThe portal is designed to support academic user

communitieso online user profileso shared online bookmarkso tags

CapabilitiesPublic user profiles with the user’s tag cloud

RSS feeds

Click tagging

Bookmark any URL and users describe bookmarks with one or more keyword tags

Users can search award funding and project data

User’s tag cloud

Social networking information

RSS feeds

Tagging

Intended to foster research collaborations

Interesting or uninteresting

NSF Tag Cloud

• The Tag Cloud displays all meta tags which were created automatically from the NSF Awards

• You can browse all the projects related to these meta tags

• Eg. Clicking “2007” would display all the people who have the tag “2007” meaning that they worked in projects awarded in the year 2007.

• Meta Tags:• Year name “2008”• Size of the Project “Small” “Medium” “Large”• NSf Directorate “GEO” “BIO” etc.

USER WHO HAVE TAG “2007”USER WHO HAVE TAG “2007”

Researcher’s tag cloud and list of funded projects

Tagging and Folksonomies

Exploring communities in Collaborative Tagging SystemsA user may want to see other people who

have tagged on the same object

Find a group of people who might have the same interest and look at their bookmarks or resources

Models of Collaborative Tagging SystemMain elements of collaborative tagging systems

consist of tags, recourses, and userso Tag can be keywords, terms, or neologismso Graphical connections

Models of Collaborative Tagging SystemGeneral purpose of tagging systemso Find specific resources tagged collaboratively by

multiple userso Retrieve information about resources or users

Models of Collaborative Tagging SystemTwo different models:o Vector space model

Frequencies of tag occurrences for searching Information retrieval

o Graph model Graphical characteristics• Path and degree of connectivity between nodes

Social network analysis

Models of Collaborative Tagging SystemVector space modelo A resource (or a user) is represented as a vector

of tagso For example:

A resource tagged by 2 occurrences of tag1, 1 occurrence of tag2• <2, 1>

Models of Collaborative Tagging SystemGraph modelo Searching is task to find specific properties in

the graph

Discovering CommunitiesMost common examples of social activities in a

network is expressing one’s interests

Finding a group of people who are working on the same topics or interests which we call “discovering a community”

Frequency Analysis and ClusteringFind information:o More frequently used tagso More referenced resourceso More actively involved users

Structural AnalysisThe structural analysis considers the tagging

activities as a grapho More intuitive and human-understandable

Help users to find other informationo Connectivity, connection distances between

userso Size of communitieso Degree of strength of a connection

Summary and future workThis paper describes the design and

implementation of the MSI-CIEC Networking Portal

This work is motivated by the need to support social networks of researchers

Using the portal as a laboratory for core computer science work on social network analysis

The key problem with most social network applications is the lack of interoperabiity