The Social Semantics of LiveJournal FOAF: Structure and Change from 2004 to 2005

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The Social Semantics of LiveJournal FOAF
Structure and Change from 2004 to 2005

• ISWC2005 Workshop on
• Semantic Network AnalysisNovember 7, 2005

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Weblogs and Online Journals

• Weblog a regularly updated web page, with
  entries in reverse chronological order
• Facilitated by blogging software
• Hosted on many central sites
• Entries often have hyperlinks, especially to
  other weblogs
• Online journal a regularly updated web page
  hosted on a site that provides facilities for
  managing social contacts
• blog.livedoor.com
• www.livejournal.com
• www.mypress.com
• www.deadjournal.com
• www.xanga.com
• yaplog.jp

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Social Network Metadata

• Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) project
• Initiated by World-Wide Web Consortium
• Dan Brickley, Libby Miller, John Breslin, Stefan
  Decker, etc.
• 1997 to present
• A practical experiment
• Use semantic web to make (virtual) communities
  self-aware
• Target social networking applications
• tribe.net, ecademy, Orkut, etc.

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Problems

• What sort of relationships typically exist within
  the data provided as FOAF by LiveJournal?
• - when relationships do exist, how stable are
  they?
• Does it contain discernable and useful patterns?
• What sorts of inference might such patterns
  support?

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Method

• Specifically focus on
• foafinterests
• foafknows
• Quantitative analysis of a substantial sample of
  FOAF data
• Principal Components Analysis
• Hierarchical clustering
• Social network analysis
• Comparison at two different points in time
• Examine patterns for stability

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The Initial Sample from some of our previous
work.

• User profiles crawled over 5 days, March 2004
• Courtesy of Jim Ley
• Total of 33512 LiveJournal FOAF profiles.
• http//www.jibbering.com/foaf/dumps/
• This produced a sample of convenience, not a true
  random sample. However, it does produce a cross
  section of LiveJournal users which represent the
  diversity of the LJ users as a whole.

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Interests

• Incidence matrix
• 500 most common interests, 11K participants
• normalized (z-score)
• Principal components analysis
• 20 dimensions selected for interpretation
• Component scores for all participants
• Component loadings for all 500 interests
• Hierarchical cluster analysis
• on participants groups for SNA
• on interests for interpretation of social groups
• Cuts at 9 and 76 groups

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Interest Clusters

• Red General (intellectual pursuits)
• Orange Art
• Lt Green Nightlife
• Green Romance
• Cyan Sexuality
• Lt Blue Grunge music, piercing/tattoos
• Dk Blue Sci-fi fantasy comics
• Violet Music
• Magenta Goth/fetish

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Red General/ Intellectual Pursuits
Christianity
outdoors/ nature
culture centers
leisure
Philosophy
Feminism
home
kids
cinema
science
arts
drama
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Cyan Sexuality
ambisexual
men/women
passion
pornography
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Magenta Goth Fetish
Industrial
Fetish
Goth
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Interests

• Principal Components

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Niche
Mainstream
High Freq
Low Freq
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Intellectual
Sensual
Society
Fantasy
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Experience
Expression
Social
Private
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???
???
Pagan
Christian
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Stability

• Are the patterns stable over time?

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A (Partly) New Sample

• 2004 sample
• 500 most popular interests
• 500 most popular users
• 2005 re-sample
• Same set of users as before, same set of
  interests and popular users
• Combined incidence matrix
• PCA (z-score column-wise normalized)
• Hierarchical cluster analysis (separate by
  relation and year)

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knows
interest
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2005
2004
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• Five Cluster Cut by Year
• 2004 interests
• Science Fiction, Fantasy, Celtic, and graphic
  arts,
• General interests
• Sex, goth subculture, body modification and
  fetish
• A variety of contemporary music interests (The
  Cure, Joy Division,
• David Bowie, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Led
  Zeppelin, Ani DiFranco,
• Modest Mouse, etc.)
• Industrial and alternative rock music.
• 2005 interests
• Social, natural, and mystical interests
• General interests
• Ska, punk and alternative rock music
• Science Fiction, Fantasy, Celtic, and graphic
  arts
• Sex, goth subculture, body modification and
  fetish

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Global Change 2004-2005
foafknows
foafinterests
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Summary Observations

• In both 2004 and 2005
• foafinterests and foafknows are uncorrelated
  with each other
• foafinterests and foafknows are strongly
  intra-correlated
• correlations of interests are weaker than those
  of knows
• Local groupings show a great deal of change
• strong inferences are not licensed
• Global change from 2004 to 2005 is minimal
• slight weakening of most popular 2004 interests
• slight strengthening of most popular friends
  (celebs)

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Remaining Issues

• Sampling issues
• The scale of the available data is very large
• Snowball sampling from the large site makes it
  unclear what piece of the network we get
• Additional random sampling points may improve
  this
• Dynamics
• We need to know more about how the interests and
  friends relations change over time

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References

• Degenne, Alain and Michel Forse. 1999.
  Introducing Social Networks. Thousand Oaks,
  California Sage Publications.
• FOAF Vocabulary Specification. http//xmlns.com/fo
  af/0.1/ Accessed July 18, 2004.
• Granovetter, M. The strength of weak ties.
  American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380
  (1973).
• Forse, Michel. 1981. La sociabilite. Economie et
  Statistique 13239-48.
• Kling, Rob. What is Social Informatics and Why
  Does it Matter? D-Lib Magazine. Volume 5 Number 1
  (January 1999).
• Lavoie, Brian et al. Trends in the Evolution of
  the Public Web. D-lib Magazine v9.4, April 2003.
  Available at http//www.dlib.org/dlib/april03/lavo
  ie/04lavoie.html. Accessed July 18, 2004
• O'Neill, Edward et al. A Methodology for Sampling
  the World Wide Web. Available at
  http//digitalarchive.oclc.org/da/ViewObject.jsp?o
  bjid0000003447. Accessed July 18, 2004.
• Paolillo, John C. 2001. Language variation on
  Internet Relay Chat A social network approach.
  Journal of Sociolinguistics 5180-213.
• Reid, E. M. 1991. Electropolis Communication and
  Community on Internet Relay Chat. B.A. Honours
  Thesis, Department of History, University of
  Melbourne.
• RDF Syntax Specification. http//www.w3.org/TR/rdf
  -syntax-grammar/. Accessed July 18, 2004.
• W3C Semantic Web Activity Statement.
  http//www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity. Accessed July
  18, 2004.
• Wasserman, Stanley and Katherine Faust. Social
  Network Analysis. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1994.

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