Social Network Analysis and Conceptual Structures: Exploring Opportunities

ICFCA 2007 Workshop "Social Network Analysis and Conceptual Structures: Exploring Opportunities"
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http://snafca.free.fr

February 16, 2007

in conjunction with The 5th International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis (ICFCA 2007) Clermont-Ferrand, France, February 12-16, 2007 http://www.isima.fr/icfca07/


2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

The recent years have seen a renewed interest in an interdisciplinary effort aiming at analyzing social networks, in which both mathematical sociology and computer science play a notable role, relying altogether extensively on graph theory. This effort has mainly been fueled and supported by significant advances in computing capabilities and electronic data availability for several social systems: scientists, webloggers, online customers, computer-based collaboration-enhancing devices, inter alia.

In particular, knowledge networks, i.e. interaction networks where agents produce or exchange knowledge, are the focus of many current studies, both qualitative and quantitative. Among these, community-detection issues such as finding agents sharing sets of identical patterns are a key topic. Social network analysis is proficient in methods aimed at discovering, describing, and plausibly organizing various kinds of social communities.

At the same time, conceptual structures can yield a fruitful insight in this regard, be it in relation to epistemic communities (i.e. agents dealing with identical topics, such as scientific communities or weblogs) or to affiliation networks (actors belonging to the same organizations, participating in identical events). And, indeed, some applications of concept lattices in sociology have been proposed since the early 1990s; yet, in that context social aspects of community structures are usually of prime interest: leaders, peripheral members, cooperation within and between different groups.

On the other hand, conceptual structures are typically focused around taxonomies -- possibly useful to describe actors in terms of centers of interest, for instance -- rather than focused on interactions. More broadly, notions pertaining to social network analysis seem presently to remain somehow outside the mainstream research of the concept lattice community.

The aim of this workshop is to investigate the opportunities for formal concept analysis in social networks by proposing possible bridges between these frameworks and by presenting issues of mathematical sociology which could benefit from conceptual structures, so as to eventually facilitate collaboration between the two fields. Therefore, we particularly welcome submissions of the survey type describing the state of the art in any of the fields listed below along with submissions specifying a concrete problem that still needs an efficient formal solution. Submissions may but do not have to address the possible use of formal concept analysis in these fields.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Social scientists using or willing to use formal techniques in any of the fields listed below; researchers in discrete structures and formal concept analysis interested in applications in social sciences.

TOPICS

  Knowledge networks / epistemic networks
  Collective construction of knowledge, social cognition
  Social epistemology applied to social networks
  Social network analysis of communities of practice
  Information diffusion in social networks
  Affiliation networks
  Social network-based methods for community detection
  Web communities, open-source development communities
  Weblog analysis
  Social networking websites
  Collaboration-enhancing tools (in organizations, on the web, inter alia)
  Knowledge exchange devices
  Semantic web and social networks
  Knowledge management using social data
  Building semantics from collaborative environments
  Taxonomies and ontologies for scientific domains
  Network analysis for folksonomies
  Systems for folksonomy building
  Evolution of network structures


SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Papers no longer than 16 pages should be submitted no later than January 5, 2007 to sna.fca@gmail.com in Adobe PDF or Postscript format. Papers should also be formatted according to the official formatting guidelines of the main conference (LNCS). Short papers are also welcome.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: January 5, 2007
Notification of acceptance: January 22, 2007 Workshop date: February 16, 2007

ORGANIZERS

Sergei Obiedkov (Higher School of Economics, Russia)  -  sergei.obj@gmail.com

Camille Roth (University of Modena, Italy & CREA/CNRS, France)  -  roth@shs.polytechnique.fr


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

  Alain Degenne (CNRS, France)
  Vincent Duquenne (University of Paris VI/CNRS, France)
  Peter Eklund (University of Wollongong, Australia)
  Linton C. Freeman (UC Irvine, USA)
  Andreas Hotho (University of Kassel, Germany)
  Jeffrey H. Johnson (Open University, UK)
  Cliff Joslyn (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)
  Bjoern Koester (University of Dresden, Germany)
  Sergei Kuznetsov (Higher School of Economics & VINITI, Russia)
  John Levi Martin (University of Wisconsin at Madison, USA)
  Michel Morvan (ENS Lyon-EHESS, France)
  Amedeo Napoli (LORIA/CNRS, France)
  Jean Sallantin (LIRMM/CNRS, France)
  Gerd Stumme (University of Kassel, Germany)