With social media and the according social and ubiquitous applications finding their way into everyday life, there is a rapidly growing amount of user generated content yielding explicit and implicit network structures. We consider social activities and phenomena as proxies for user relatedness. Such activities are represented in so-called social interaction networks or evidence networks, with different degrees of explicitness. We focus on evidence networks containing relations on users, which are represented by connections between individual nodes. Explicit interaction networks are then created by specific user actions, for example, when building a friend network. On the other hand, more implicit networks capture user traces or evidences of user actions as observed in Web portals, blogs, resource sharing systems, and many other social services. These implicit networks can be applied for a broad range of analysis methods instead of using expensive gold-standard information. In this paper, we analyze different properties of a set of networks in social media. We show that there are dependencies and correlations between the networks. These allow for drawing reciprocal conclusions concerning pairs of networks, based on the assessment of structural correlations and ranking interchangeability. Additionally, we show how these inter-network correlations can be used for assessing the results of structural analysis techniques, e.g., community mining methods.

The combination of ubiquitous and social computing is an emerging research area which integrates different but complementary methods, techniques and tools. In this paper, we focus on the Ubicon platform, its applications, and a large spectrum of analysis results. Ubicon provides an extensible framework for building and hosting applications targeting both ubiquitous and social environments. We summarize the architecture and exemplify its implementation using four real-world applications built on top of Ubicon. In addition, we discuss several scientific experiments in the context of these applications in order to give a better picture of the potential of the framework, and discuss analysis results using several real-world data sets collected utilizing Ubicon.

Applications of the Social Web are ubiquitous and have become an integral part of everyday life: Users make friends, for example, with the help of online social networks, share thoughts via Twitter, or collaboratively write articles in Wikipedia. All such interactions leave digital traces; thus, users participate in the creation of heterogeneous, distributed, collaborative data collections. In linguistics, the

The information contained in social tagging systems is often modelled as a graph of connections between users, items and tags. Recommendation algorithms such as FolkRank, have the potential to leverage complex relationships in the data, corresponding to multiple hops in the graph. We present an in-depth analysis and evaluation of graph models for social tagging data and propose novel adaptations and extensions of FolkRank to improve tag recommendations. We highlight implicit assumptions made by the widely used folksonomy model, and propose an alternative and more accurate graph-representation of the data. Our extensions of FolkRank address the new item problem by incorporating content data into the algorithm, and significantly improve prediction results on unpruned datasets. Our adaptations address issues in the iterative weight spreading calculation that potentially hinder FolkRank's ability to leverage the deep graph as an information source. Moreover, we evaluate the benefit of considering each deeper level of the graph, and present important insights regarding the characteristics of social tagging data in general. Our results suggest that the base assumption made by conventional weight propagation methods, that closeness in the graph always implies a positive relationship, does not hold for the social tagging domain.

Since the rise of collaborative tagging systems on the web, the tag recommendation task -- suggesting suitable tags to users of such systems while they add resources to their collection -- has been tackled. However, the (offline) evaluation of tag recommendation algorithms usually suffers from difficulties like the sparseness of the data or the cold start problem for new resources or users. Previous studies therefore often used so-called post-cores (specific subsets of the original datasets) for their experiments. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale experiment in which we analyze different tag recommendation algorithms on different cores of three real-world datasets. We show, that a recommender's performance depends on the particular core and explore correlations between performances on different cores.