Context Specific Modeling of Communicational and Informational Content in Facebook

Background

The modeling of social structures has a long tradition in the social science (Freeman, 2004). With the spread of the internet, the formalization of social structures has new significance for the specification of social interactions and data mining. The large amount of distributed data has to be structured and stored. In addition, the modeling of exchanged information between communicators is an interesting aspect. Communicational content provides information about behavior and gains a fast possibility to get and analyze data (Russell 2014). Therefore, the structuring and formalization of these data is an important aspect for further processing.

Social networks are social structures. Vertices can be modeled as individuals and the links between them can be represented as e.g. friendship (Han, Kamber, & Pei, 2012). Modeling languages like Entity-Relationship Modeling (Chen, 1976) have a very intuitive view on the real world, but cannot cover the aim to model high distributed data and data flows in social structures. Graph-based databases have their main focus on the nodes in a graph and the relations between them (Foster, Ghani, Jarmin, Kreuter, & Lane, 2016). Each system of communicators is embedded in an environment. Environmental factors take influence on communicators and their behavior.