Understanding the process of link creation is rather important for link prediction in social networks. Therefore, this paper analyzes contact structures in networks of face-to-face spatial proximity, and presents new insights on the dynamic and static contact behavior in such real world networks. We focus on face-to-face contact networks collected at different conferences using the social conference guidance system Conferator. Specifically, we investigate the strength of ties and its connection to triadic closures in face-to-face proximity networks. Furthermore, we analyze the predictability of all, new and recurring links at different points of time during the conference. In addition, we consider network dynamics for the prediction of new links.

Social bookmarking systems constitute an established part of the Web 2.0. In such systems users describe bookmarks by keywords called tags. The structure behind these social systems, called folksonomies, can be viewed as a tripartite hypergraph of user, tag and resource nodes. This underlying network shows specific structural properties that explain its growth and the possibility of serendipitous exploration. Today’s search engines represent the gateway to retrieve information from the World Wide Web. Short queries typically consisting of two to three words describe a user’s information need. In response to the displayed results of the search engine, users click on the links of the result page as they expect the answer to be of relevance. This clickdata can be represented as a folksonomy in which queries are descriptions of clicked URLs. The resulting network structure, which we will term logsonomy is very similar to the one of folksonomies. In order to find out about its properties, we analyze the topological characteristics of the tripartite hypergraph of queries, users and bookmarks on a large snapshot of del.icio.us and on query logs of two large search engines. All of the three datasets show small world properties. The tagging behavior of users, which is explained by preferential attachment of the tags in social bookmark systems, is reflected in the distribution of single query words in search engines. We can conclude that the clicking behaviour of search engine users based on the displayed search results and the tagging behaviour of social bookmarking users is driven by similar dynamics.

Social bookmark tools are rapidly emerging on the Web. In such systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. These systems provide currently relatively few structure. We discuss in this paper, how association rule mining can be adopted to analyze and structure folksonomies, and how the results can be used for ontology learning and supporting emergent semantics. We demonstrate our approach on a large scale dataset stemming from an online system.