CI-KNOW: recommendation based on social networks

ABSTRACT

Digital media and communication networks have become an important cyberinfrastructure to enable new levels of interactions in organizations and communities. A complicated knowledge network of individuals, documents, data, concepts, and their interconnections forms a virtual knowledge repository. To be more effective in using these resources, knowledge discovery tools are crucial for an organization and individual users to identify the right expertise or knowledge resources from this large "multidimensional network."

Cyberinfrastructure Knowledge Networks on the Web (CI-KNOW) is a suite of Web-based tools that facilitates discovery of resources within communities. CI-KNOW implements a network recommendation system that incorporates social motivations for why we create, maintain, and dissolve our knowledge network ties. The network data is captured by automated harvesting of digital resources using Web crawlers, text miners, tagging tools that automatically generate community-oriented metadata, and scientometric data such as co-authorship and citations. Based on this knowledge network, the CI-KNOW recommender system produces personalized search results through two steps: identify matching entities according to their metadata and network statistics and select the best fits according to requester's perspectives and connections in social networks.

Integrated with community Web portals, CI-KNOW navigation and auditing portlets provide analysis and visualization tools for community members and serves as a research testbed to examine social theories on individuals' motivations for seeking expertise from specific resources (people, documents, datasets, and etc.). As a proof-of-concept, this paper demonstrates how CI-KNOW, integrated with the NCI-supported Tobacco Informatics Grid (TobIG), facilitates knowledge sharing in the tobacco control research community.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.m Miscellaneous

  J. Computer Applications
  J.4 SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Management, Measurement

Keywords:
collaboration network, community, cyberinfrastructure, knowledge discovery, scientists' networks