Abstract:
Social Software Systems support the users at the interaction between them. These interactions can be manifold: A user can rate a hotel, write a comment for an article or tag a picture. But these interactions are sometimes burdened by the relationship between the actors, who are in this relationship. This thesis describes how relationships can be analyzed by using these interactions. The intention of this method, which shows the relationships between the interacting users, can be to differentiate between strong and weak ties in a social networking website.
The assignment of this work is to analyze the relationships in social software. To do this, at first the basics of relationships will be shown. This is necessary to understand how a framework for the analysis of relationships in social software is constructed. Further aspects are used to differentiate between relationships, for which concepts are provided, which concretize the framework. From this point the work will provide methods of the network analysis, which leads from the dyadic relationships to groups and networks.
After this part, the concept of one of the presented relationships is used to implement the analysis in a real system. After the implementation, the relationships can be identified. To prove the results a questionnaire will be done. After the evaluation, a forecast for future use of the method is shown. The result of the evaluation is that some dedicated pre-conditions must be fulfiled, so that there won't be errors in the analysis.
This thesis shows a new method to use the entire data in a social software system to derive aspects of the relationships among the users.
