information organization on the internet based on heterogeneous social networks
The social Web has become an important trend during the last few years with a thriving number of social networking sites that currently address a variety of information needs. Following a first generation of human-centered social networks, the notion of object-centered sociality has been introduced to describe the fact that strong social relationships are built mainly when individuals are grouped together around a shared object. In this paper we attempt to further enhance the notion of the social object and present the concept of heterogeneous social network, where humans and social objects are uniformly treated as equal actors. The paper discusses how this notion can be exploited in different application domains and presents in more detail a particular example from the field of medical education.
social networking object-centered sociality linked open data actor network theory semantic technologies