ICFCA 2007 Satellite Workshop

Social Network Analysis and Conceptual Structures: Exploring Opportunities

Friday, February 16, 2007



rationale  -  program new!  -  audience  -  topics

submission  -  dates  -  organizers & program committee


Rationale
The recent years have seen a renewed interest in an interdisciplinary effort aiming at analyzing social networks, in which both mathematical sociology and computer science play a notable role, relying altogether extensively on graph theory. This effort has mainly been fueled and supported by significant advances in computing capabilities and electronic data availability for several social systems: scientists, webloggers, online customers, computer-based collaboration-enhancing devices, inter alia.

In particular, knowledge networks, i.e. interaction networks where agents produce or exchange knowledge, are the focus of many current studies, both qualitative and quantitative. Among these, community-detection issues such as finding agents sharing sets of identical patterns are a key topic. Social network analysis is proficient in methods aimed at discovering, describing, and plausibly organizing various kinds of social communities.

At the same time, conceptual structures can yield a fruitful insight in this regard, be it in relation to epistemic communities (i.e. agents dealing with identical topics, such as scientific communities or weblogs) or to affiliation networks (actors belonging to the same organizations, participating in identical events). And, indeed, some applications of concept lattices in sociology have been proposed since the early 1990s; yet, in that context social aspects of community structures are usually of prime interest: leaders, peripheral members, cooperation within and between different groups.

On the other hand, conceptual structures are typically focused around taxonomies -- possibly useful to describe actors in terms of centers of interest, for instance -- rather than focused on interactions. More broadly, notions pertaining to social network analysis seem presently to remain somehow outside the mainstream research of the concept lattice community.

The aim of this workshop is to investigate the opportunities for formal concept analysis in social networks by proposing possible bridges between these frameworks and by presenting issues of mathematical sociology which could benefit from conceptual structures, so as to eventually facilitate collaboration between the two fields. Therefore, we particularly welcome submissions of the survey type describing the state of the art in any of the fields listed below along with submissions specifying a concrete problem that still needs an efficient formal solution. Submissions may but do not have to address the possible use of formal concept analysis in these fields.

Preliminary program
09:00-09:15Introduction
09:15-10:15Invited talk
Jeffrey Johnson, Open University, UK
Title to be announced.
10:15-10:30Coffee break
10:30-11:30Gerd Stumme, on folksonomies
Robert Jäschke, Andreas Hotho, Christoph Schmitz, Bernhard Ganter, Gerd Stumme.
Mining Iceberg Tri-Lattices with TRIAS
11:30-12:00Ulrik Brandes and Jürgen Lerner
Role-equivalent Actors in Networks - Group Structures Beyond Dense Communities
12:00-14:00Lunch
14:00-14:20Sergei O. Kuznetsov, Dmitrii I. Ignatov
Concept Stability for Constructing Taxonomies of Web-site Users
14:20-14:40Ana C. Trevino, Gabriel Valerio, Pablo G. Ramirez
Social Knowledge Networks at ITESM
14:40-15:00Wrap up
Target audience

Social scientists using or willing to use formal techniques in any of the fields listed below; researchers in discrete structures and formal concept analysis interested in applications in social sciences.

Topics
Submission procedure

Papers no longer than 16 pages should be submitted no later than January 5, 2007 to sna.fca@gmail.com in Adobe PDF or Postscript format. Papers should also be formatted according to the official formatting guidelines of the main conference (LNCS). Short papers are also welcome.

Important dates

Submission deadline: Sunday, January 14, 2007 (extended deadline)
Notification of acceptance: January 25, 2007
Workshop date: February 16, 2007 (the main conference takes place from Feb 12 to Feb 15)

Please, note that workshop participants are required to register for the main conference.
Organizers
Program committee


Last modified: Tue Jan 30 03:56:26 CET 2007