Section: Research Program

Communities and Social Interactions Analysis

The domain of social network analysis is a whole research domain in itself and Wimmics targets what can be done with typed graphs, knowledge representations and social models. We also focus on the specificity of social Web and semantic Web applications and in bridging and combining the different social Web data structures and semantic Web formalisms. Beyond the individual user models, we rely on social studies to build models of the communities, their vocabularies, activities and protocols in order to identify where and when formal semantics is useful. We propose models of collectives of users and of their collaborative functioning extending the collaboration personas and methods to assess the quality of coordination interactions and the quality of coordination artifacts. We extend and compare community detection algorithms to identify and label communities of interest with the topics they share. We propose mixed representations containing social semantic representations (e.g. folksonomies) and formal semantic representations (e.g. ontologies) and propose operations that allow us to couple them and exchange knowledge between them. Moving to social interaction we develop models and algorithms to mine and integrate different yet linked aspects of social media contributions (opinions, arguments and emotions) relying in particular on natural language processing and argumentation theory. To complement the study of communities we rely on multi-agent systems to simulate and study social behaviors. Finally we also rely on Web 2.0 principles to provide and evaluate social Web applications.