PALADIN A Pattern Based Approach to Knowledge Discovery in Digital Social Networks. accepte.pdfVIP

PALADIN: A Pattern Based Approach to Knowledge Discovery in Digital Social Networks Ralf Klamma, Marc Spaniol and Dimitar Denev (Lehrstuhl Informatik 5, RWTH Aachen University, Germany) {klamma|spaniol|denev}@rmatik.rwth-aachen.de Abstract: Digital media are used to facilitate social structures thus building digital so- cial networks. Disturbances in such networks occur on different levels (egocentric level, subgroup level, network) and have to be analyzed in the multidimensional context of reference disciplines like sociology and knowledge management. This paper presents a first repository of disturbance patterns for the analysis of digital social networks. Based on the Actor-Network Theory and the Social Network Analysis, new socio-theoretical models for handling complex media settings were developed. On these models a pat- tern language is defined to describe multidimensional disturbance patterns and to store them in a newly developed pattern repository. The core of the pattern language is the formal expression language for pattern (FELP) which used to specify the structural and the content-specific properties of digital social networks. Results can be visualized with open source graph visualization software. To evaluate the approach a case study has been performed in a repository containing 118 mailing lists and 17359 individuals. Patterns like troll, spammer and burst have been applied successfully. Key Words: Semantic Web, Knowledge Discovery, Pattern Language, Social Network Analysis, Actor-Network Theory Category: H.3.1, H.3.2, H.3.3, J.4 1 Introduction Information technology develops rapidly and so does computer-mediated com- munication. Internet has provided an environment where social networks can be facilitated on the basis of digtial media such as email, web logs, and wikis [17, 19]. These developments can be identified in the Semantic Web as well. The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) networks [9] is an example for a member network. With time digital networks