Characterizing social networks based on interior processes of nodes

Over the last few years, efforts have been made to describe and analyze the structure and properties of social networks. Analyzing how users behave when they connect to online networks is important for improving design and policies of websites and crucial for social studies as well as for reshaping next-generation infrastructure and content distribution systems. Most work in this direction has focused on graph-based statistical characterizations of networks, ignoring internal structure of individual nodes; however, in this type of social phenomenon, statistics are not completely satisfactory in the sense that they cannot account for individual events. This paper proposes a structural characterization of the interiors of individual nodes in terms of six generic and mutually exclusive processes: creation, release, transfer, arrival, acceptance, and processing of the artifacts that flow among and within nodes. This produces new categories of nodes such as creators of data, receivers/senders (bus boys), processors (responders), etc. Accordingly, we analyze a sample online social network in terms of these roles of nodes.