Social Networks: Querying and Sharing Mined Information

Web 2.0 has provided for a rapid growth of computer mediated social networks. We first discuss how to enrich the domain of social network modeling by introducing ideas from fuzzy sets and related soft computing technologies. One is with the introduction of fuzzy graphs representing the networks. A second is the use of the fuzzy set based paradigm of computing with words to provide a bridge between a human network analyst´s linguistic description of social network concepts and the formal model of the network. We suggest that a social network can be viewed as kind of network of databases. This leads us to understand that the development of appropriate technologies to manage social networks requires a combination of the use of network technologies and database technologies. Here began to look at two important aspects of this combination. The first is querying the social network with its nodes seen as individual databases. The other is the sharing of information mined from social networks using linguistic summaries. In both cases are focus is on the centrality of the human in the loop.