Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

The Social Dimension of Information Ranking: A Discussion of Research Challenges and Approaches

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Socioinformatics - The Social Impact of Interactions between Humans and IT

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

  • 722 Accesses

Abstract

The ability to quickly extract relevant knowledge from large-scale information repositories like the World Wide Web, scholarly publication databases or Online Social Networks has become crucial to our information society. Apart from the technical issues involved in the storage, processing and retrieval of huge amounts of data, the design of automated mechanisms which rank and filter information based on their relevance (i) in a given context, and (ii) to a particular user has become a major challenge. In this chapter we argue that, due to the fact that information systems are increasingly interwoven with the social systems into which they are embedded, the ranking and filtering of information is effectively a socio-technical problem. Drawing from recent developments in the context of social information systems, we highlight a number of research challenges which we argue should become an integral part of a social informatics research agenda. We further review promising research approaches that can give rise to a systems design of information systems that addresses both its technical and social dimension in an integrated way.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Anvik J (2006) Automating bug report assignment. In: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on software engineering, ICSE ’06, Shanghai. ACM, New York, pp 937–940. 10.1145/1134285.1134457. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1134285.1134457

  2. Bakshy E, Rosenn I, Marlow C, Adamic L (2012) The role of social networks in information diffusion. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on world wide web, Lyon. ACM, pp 519–528

    Google Scholar 

  3. Berners-Lee T, Groff JF (1992) Www. SIGBIO Newsl 12(3):37–40. 10.1145/147126.147133. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/147126.147133

  4. Bettenburg N, Just S, Schröter A, Weiss C, Premraj R, Zimmermann T (2008) What makes a good bug report? In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on foundations of software engineering, SIGSOFT ’08/FSE-16, Atlanta. ACM, New York, pp 308–318. 10.1145/1453101.1453146. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1453101.1453146

  5. Brin S, Page L (1998) The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Comput Netw ISDN Syst 30(1–7):107–117. 10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00110-X. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S016975529800110X

  6. Bughin J, Corb L, Manyika J, Nottebohm O, Chui M, de Muller Barbat B, Said R (2011) The impact of internet technologies: search. McKinsey&Company, High Tech Practice

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cubranic D, Murphy GC (2004) Automatic bug triage using text categorization. In: Maurer F, Ruhe G (eds) SEKE, Banff, pp 92–97

    Google Scholar 

  8. Frisse M (1988) Searching for information in a hypertext medical handbook. Commun ACM 31(7):880–886

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Gao J, Buldyrev SV, Stanley HE, Havlin S (2012) Networks formed from interdependent networks. Nat Phys 8(1):40–48

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Garcia D, Schweitzer F (2012) Modeling online collective emotions. In: Proceedings of the 2012 workshop on data-driven user behavioral modelling and mining from social media-DUBMMSM ’12, CIKM2012, Maui. ACM, New York, p 37. 10.1145/2390131.2390147. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2390131.2390147

  11. Goldman R, Shivakumar N, Venkatasubramanian S, Garcia-Molina H (1998) Proximity search in databases. In: Proceedings of the 24th international conference on very large data bases, VLDB ’98, New York. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, pp 26–37. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=645924.671346

  12. Granovetter M (1973) The strength of weak ties. Am J Sociol 78(6):l

    Google Scholar 

  13. Halu A, Mondragón RJ, Panzarasa P, Bianconi G (2013) Multiplex pagerank. PLoS ONE 8(10):e78,293. 10.1371/journal.pone.0078293. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0078293

  14. Hannak A, Sapiezynski P, Molavi Kakhki A, Krishnamurthy B, Lazer D, Mislove A, Wilson C (2013) Measuring personalization of web search. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on world wide web, Rio de Janeiro. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, pp 527–538

    Google Scholar 

  15. Haveliwala T, Kamvar S, Jeh G (2003) An analytical comparison of approaches to personalizing pagerank. Technical report 2003–35, Stanford InfoLab. http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/596/

  16. Holme P, Saramäki J (2012) Temporal networks. Phys Rep 519(3):97–125

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Introna L, Nissenbaum H (2000) The politics of search engines. IEEE Comput 54–62. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=816269

  18. Jeh G, Widom J (2003) Scaling personalized web search. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on world wide web, WWW ’03, Budapest. ACM, New York, pp 271–279. 10.1145/775152.775191. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/775152.775191

  19. Kleinberg J (1999) Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. J ACM (JACM) 46:604–632. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=324140

  20. Kraemer F, Overveld K, Peterson M (2010) Is there an ethics of algorithms? Ethics Inf Technol 13(3):251–260. 10.1007/s10676-010-9233-7. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10676-010-9233-7

  21. Kwak H, Lee C, Park H, Moon S (2010) What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on world wide web, Raleigh. ACM, pp 591–600

    Google Scholar 

  22. Lerman K, Ghosh R (2010) Information contagion: an empirical study of the spread of news on Digg and Twitter social networks. ICWSM 10:90–97

    Google Scholar 

  23. Liben-Nowell D, Kleinberg J (2003) The link prediction problem for social networks. In: Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on information and knowledge management, CIKM ’03, New Orleans. ACM, New York, pp 556–559. 10.1145/956863.956972. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/956863.956972

  24. Mavrodiev P, Tessone CJ, Schweitzer F (2012) Effects of social influence on the wisdom of crowds. CoRR abs/1204.3463

    Google Scholar 

  25. Naaman M, Boase J, Lai, CH (2010) Is it really about me?: message content in social awareness streams. In: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work, Savannah. ACM, pp 189–192

    Google Scholar 

  26. Newman MEJ (2010) Networks: an introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206650.001.0001. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206650.001.0001/acprof-9780199206650

  27. Page L, Brin S, Motwani R, Winograd T (1999) The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the web. Technical report, Stanford InfoLab. http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422

  28. Pariser E (2011) The filter bubble: what the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin, New York

    Google Scholar 

  29. Parunak HVD (2011) Swarming on symbolic structures: guiding self-organizing search with domain knowledge. In: Eighth international conference on information technology: new generations, ITNG 2011, Las Vegas, 11–13 Apr 2011, pp 896–901

    Google Scholar 

  30. Parunak HVD, Downs E, Yinger A (2011) Socially-constrained exogenously-driven opinion dynamics: explorations with a multi-agent model. In: SASO, Ann Arbor. IEEE, pp 158–167

    Google Scholar 

  31. Pfitzner R, Garas A (2012) Emotional divergence influences information spreading in Twitter. In: AAAI ICWSM 2012, pp 2–5

    Google Scholar 

  32. Pfitzner R, Scholtes I, Garas A, Tessone CJ, Schweitzer F (2013) Betweenness preference: quantifying correlations in the topological dynamics of temporal networks. Phys Rev Lett 110(19):198,701. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.198701. http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i19/e198701

  33. Rosvall M, Esquivel AV, Lancichinetti A, West JD, Lambiotte R (2013) Networks with memory. arXiv preprint, arXiv:1305.4807

    Google Scholar 

  34. Sarigöl E, Pfitzner R, Scholtes I, Garas A, Schweitzer F (2014) Predicting scientific success based on coauthorship networks. Working paper

    Google Scholar 

  35. Scheitzer F (2003) Brownian agents and active particles. Collective dynamics in the natural and social sciences. Springer series in synergetics. Springer, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  36. Scholtes I, Wider N, Pfitzner R, Garas A, Tessone CJ, Schweitzer F (2013) Slow-down vs. speed-up of diffusion in non-markovian temporal networks. arXiv preprint. http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4030

  37. Šuvakov M, Garcia D, Schweitzer F, Tadić B (2012) Agent-based simulations of emotion spreading in online social networks. ArXiv e-prints

    Google Scholar 

  38. Tomforde S, Hähner J, Seebach H, Reif W, Sick B, Wacker A, Scholtes I (2014) Engineering and mastering interwoven systems. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on self-optimisation in organic and autonomic computing systems (SAOS 2014), Lübeck

    Google Scholar 

  39. Walter FE, Battiston S, Schweitzer F (2009) Personalised and dynamic trust in social networks. In: Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Recommender systems – RecSys ’09, New York. ACM, New York, pp 197–204. 10.1145/1639714.1639747

    Google Scholar 

  40. Zanetti MS, Scholtes I, Tessone CJ, Schweitzer F (2013) Categorizing bugs with social networks: a case study on four open source software communities. In: Proceedings of the 35th international conference on software engineering, ICSE ’13, San Francisco, 18–26 May 2013, pp 1032–1041

    Google Scholar 

  41. Zwass V (2014) In: Encyclopaedia britannica http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/287895/information-system. Retrieved 11 Feb 2014

Download references

Acknowledgements

IS and FS acknowledge support by the Swiss National Foundation, grant no. CR31I1_140644/1. We further acknowledge support by COST action TD1210: Analyzing the dynamics of information and knowledge landscapes.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Weinbergstrasse 56/58, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Ingo Scholtes, René Pfitzner & Frank Schweitzer

Authors
  1. Ingo Scholtes
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. René Pfitzner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Frank Schweitzer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ingo Scholtes .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, TU Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Katharina Zweig

  2. Faculty Social Sciences, TU Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Wolfgang Neuser

  3. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany

    Volkmar Pipek

  4. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany

    Markus Rohde

  5. Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Ingo Scholtes

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Scholtes, I., Pfitzner, R., Schweitzer, F. (2014). The Social Dimension of Information Ranking: A Discussion of Research Challenges and Approaches. In: Zweig, K., Neuser, W., Pipek, V., Rohde, M., Scholtes, I. (eds) Socioinformatics - The Social Impact of Interactions between Humans and IT. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09378-9_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09378-9_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09377-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09378-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics