The rapid development and expansion of the social services and social networking sites (SNSs) on the Internet has boosted interdisciplinary research on online communities as a part of social network analysis. Social networking creates a unique opportunity to establish new business contacts with people from unexplored markets to gain new customers or contractors. The goal of the paper is to pres...

Social network analysis has attracted much attention in recent years. Community mining is one of the major directions in social network analysis. Most of the existing methods on community mining assume that there is only one kind of relation in the network, and moreover, the mining results are independent of the users’ needs or preferences. However, in reality, there exist multiple, heterogeneo...

Web is a platform for users to search for information to fulfill their information needs but it is also an ideal platform to express personal opinions and comments. A virtual community is formed when a number of members participate in this kind of communication. Nowadays, teenagers are spending extensive amount of time to communicate with strangers in these virtual communities. At the same time...

Open innovation is an emergent paradigm by which organisations make use of their internal and external resources to perform their innovation processes. The growth of information and communication technologies has facilitated the spread of online open innovation communities, where users can share ideas as well as comment on and evaluate ideas posted by other community members. In this work, the ...

The evolution of the Web has promoted a growing interest in social network analysis, such as community detection. Among many different community detection approaches, there are two kinds that we want to address: one considers the graph structure of the network (topology-based community detection approach); the other one takes the textual information of the network nodes into consideration (topi...

In this article, an online support community for older people is studied, with the aim of developing a taxonomy of social roles based on content analysis and social network analysis. Four hundred messages (posted between August 9, 2007, and February 5, 2008) in an online support community for older people (http://www.seniornet.org) were investigated. The data were analyzed to identify and shed ...

In this exploratory study, Cocciolo, Chae and Natriello investigate the extent to which the communicative processes exhibited within a large digital repository illustrate the emergence of an online community of practice (CoP). In order to make this claim, we present a method for identifying the emergence of an online CoP using Social Network Analysis (SNA) on communication data (i.e., uploads a...

Online communities and social software are revolutionizing the way we interact with the web. Analysing the interactions that take place there is complex. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a powerful way of doing such analysis. This tutorial provides a detailed introduction to SNA. The theory is backed up with a number of practical case studies.

Word of mouth (WOM) affects the buying behavior of information receivers stronger than advertisements. Opinion leaders further affect others in a specific domain through their new information, ideas and opinions. Identification of opinion leaders has become one of the most important tasks in the field of WOM mining. Existing work to find opinion leaders is based mainly on quantitative approache...

Real-world social networks, while disparate in nature, often comprise of a set of loose clusters (a.k.a. communities), in which members are better connected to each other than to the rest of the network. In addition, such communities are often hierarchical, reflecting the fact that some communities are composed of a few smaller, sub-communities. Discovering the complicated hierarchical communit...