Group Preferences in Social Network Services

With the beginning of the new millenium, the concept of group interactions in communication systems was boosted by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Based on this new area of application, the notion of group decisions and group preferences also evolved, leading to new requirements for corresponding modeling frameworks. Purely numeric approaches are barely able to meet these newly emerging challenges. Therefore, we provide a comprehensive group preference framework to overcome the deficits of previous solutions and demonstrate possible applications in social network services. The concept provides both numeric and semantic means which can be applied to determine group preferences and to perform further evaluations based on the semantic value of preference terms. With Preference SQL a powerful system exists to implement the presented group preference model using standard commercial databases.