Role of Context in Social Networks

May 2004

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

Volume

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

All Papers

We propose to apply a context-based approach used in AI for discussing of social networks and virtual communities in the enterprise area. We point out that making context explicit it is possible to provide a global picture of the main aspects of social networks. A first result of this study is that the explicit consideration of contexts—especially shared contexts—could improve notably the collaborative-work processes in an enterprise. A second result is the interest of simultaneously considering the paradigms of context and social network when ICT is at the core of the enterprise. A third result is to point out that different types of context account for the flux of information between groups as well as inside each group. Finally, a parallel is lead between the couple proceduralized context versus contextual knowledge in AI and virtual community versus social networks. This parallel allows to assimilate a virtual community to a contextualization of a social network, i.e. a kind of a chunk of actors.