CCS363 SOCIAL NETWOK SECURITY UNIT – I

1
 UNIT I

INTRODUCTION

Semantic Web
 The Semantic Web is the application of advanced knowledge technologies to the Web
and distributed systems in general.
 Information that is missing or hard to access for our machines can be made accessible
using ontologies.
 Ontologies are formal, which allows a computer to emulate human ways of reasoning
with knowledge.
 Ontologies carry a social commitment toward using a set of concepts and relationships in
an agreed way.
 The Semantic Web adds another layer on the Web architecture that requires agreements
to ensure interoperability.

LIMITATIONS OF THE CURRENT WEB

 finding relevant information

 extracting relevant information
 combining and reusing information

aptation to our primary interface to the vast information that constitutes the
Web: the search engine.
2
satisfaction or not at all.

What’s wrong with the Web?

The questions below are specific. They represent very general categories of search tasks. In each
of these cases semantic technology would drastically improve the computer’s ability to give more
appropriate answers.
 To answer such a question using the Web one would go to the search engine and enter the
most logical keyword: SIT1610 Social network analysis. The results returned by Google
are shown in Figure 1
 From the top ten results only three are related to the social network analysis notes we are
interested in. The word SIT1610 means a number of things. It’s show the set of images,
notes and general topics about Social network analysis.
 Two of the hits related to notes, three related to syllabus of social network analysis and
other related to general concepts of social networking analysis.
 The problem is thus that the keyword SIT1610 is polysemous
 The reason is search engines know that users are not likely to look at more than the topten
results. Search engines are thus programmed in such a way that the first page shows a
diversity of the most relevant links related to the keyword.
 This allows the user to quickly realize the ambiguity of the query and to make it more
Specific.

3
Fig.1 Search results for the keyword SIT1610 Social network analysis using Google

2. Show me photo of Paris

Typing “Paris photos” in search engine returned the result in google image as below. The search
engine fails to discriminate two categories of images: i. related to the city of Paris and ii. showing
Paris Hilton While the search engine does a good job with retrieving documents, the results of
image searches in general are disappointing. For the keyword Paris most of us would expect photos
of places in Paris or maps of the city. In reality only about half of the photos onthe first page, a
quarter of the photos on the second page and a fifth on the third page are directly related to our
concept of Paris. The rest are about clouds, people, signs, diagrams etc

Problems:
 Associating photos with keywords is a much more difficult task than simply looking for
keywords in the texts of documents.
 Automatic image recognition is currently a largely unsolved research problem.
 Search engines attempt to understand the meaning of the image solely from its context
Find new music that I (might) like This is a difficult query. From the perspective of
automation, music retrieval is just as problematic as image search. search engines do not exist for
different reasons: most music on the internet is shared illegally through peer-to-peer systems that
are completely out of reach for search engines. Music is also a fast moving good; search engines
typically index the Web once a month and therefore too slow for the fast moving world of music
releases. On the other hand, our musical taste might change in which case this query would need
to change its form. A description of our musical taste is something that we might list on our
homepage but it is not something that we would like to keep typing in again for accessing
different music-related services on the internet.

Tell me about music players with a capacity of at least 4GB

4
This is a typical e-commerce query: looking for a product with certain characteristics.
One of the immediate concerns is that translating this query from natural language to the boolean
language of search engines is (almost) impossible.

The search engine will not know that 4GB is the capacity of the music player.
Problem is that general purpose search engines do not know anything about music players or their
properties and how to compare such properties.
Another bigger problem in our machines is trying to collect and aggregate product information
from the Web. The information extraction methods used for this purpose have a very difficult task
and it is easy to see why if we consider how a typical product description page looks like to the
eyes of the computer.

Even if an algorithm can determine that the page describes a music player, information about the
product is very difficult to spot.

Further, what one vendor calls “capacity” and another may call “memory”. In order to compare
music players from different shops we need to determine that these two properties are actually the
same and we can directly compare their values.

Google Scholar and CiteSeer are the two most well-known examples.

They suffer from the typical weaknesses of information extraction, e.g. when searching York Sure,
the name of a Semantic Web researcher, Scholar returns also publications that are published in
New York, but have otherwise nothing to do with the researcher in question. The cost of such
errors is very low, however: most of us just ignore the incorrect results.
In the first case, the search is limited to the stores known by the system. On the other hand, the
second method is limited by the human effort required for maintaining product categories as well
as locating websites and implementing methods of information extraction. As a result, these
comparison sites feature only a selected number of vendors, product types and attributes.

5
How to improve current Web?
 Increasing automatic linking among data
 Increasing recall and precision in search
 Increasing automation in data integration
 Increasing automation in the service life cycle
Adding semantics to data and services is the solution!

1.3 DEVELOPMENT OF SEMANTIC WEB

RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND STANDARDIZATION
The vision of extending the current human-focused Web with machine process able descriptions
of web content has been first formulated in 1996 by Tim Berners-Lee, the original inventor of the
Web.
Semantic Web has been actively promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium. The
organization is chiefly responsible for setting technical standards on the Web.
agencies on both
sides of the Atlantic, reshaping much of the AI research agenda in a relatively short period of time.

acquiring knowledge from the World Wide Web.

precisely delineate the boundaries of this network. For research on the Semantic Web

6
community, researchers have submitted publications or held an organizing role at any of the past
International Semantic Web Conferences.

academia (79%) and to a lesser degree from industry (21%). Geographically, the community
covers much of the United States, Europe, with some activity in Japan and Australia.
-based languages for knowledge
representation and reasoning has been developed in the research field of Artificial Intelligence.
the potential for connecting information sources on a Web-scale emerged, the languages that
have been used in the past to describe the content of the knowledge bases of stand-alone expert
systems have been adapted to the open, distributed environment of the Web.

Since the exchange of knowledge in standard languages is crucial for the interoperability of tools
and services on the Semantic Web, these languages have been standardized by the W3C.

Technology adoption
The Semantic Web was originally conceptualized as an extension of the current Web, i.e. as the
application of metadata for describing Web content. In this vision, the content that is already on
the Web.

t the Semantic Web will first break through behind the

scenes and not with the ordinary users, but among large providers of data and services.
“web of data” operated
by data and service providers.

Semantic Web.

Difficulties:

The problem is that as a technology for developers, users of the Web never experiences the
Semantic Web directly, which makes it difficult to convey Semantic Web technology to
stakeholders. Further, most of the times the gains for developers are achieved over the long term,
i.e. when data and services need to reused and re-purposed. The semantic web suffers from Fax-
effect.

When the first fax machines were introduced, they came with a very hefty price tag. Yet they were
almost useless. The usefulness of a fax comes from being able to communicate with other fax
users. In this sense every fax unit sold increases the value of all fax machines in use.

Semantic Web the beginning the price of technological investment is very high. One
has to adapt the new technology which requires an investment in learning. The technology
needs time to become more reliable.

7
 required a certain kind of agreement to get the system working on a global scale: all fax
machines needed to adopt the same protocol for communicating over the telephone line. This is
similar to the case of the Web where global interoperability is guaranteed by the standard protocol
for communication (HTTP).

some primitive symbols, i.e. on what is communicated through the network.

Our machines can also help in this task to the extent that some of the meaning can be describedin
formal rules (e.g. if A is true, B should follow). But formal knowledge typically captures onlythe
smaller part of the intended meaning and thus there needs to be a common grounding in an external
reality that is shared by those at separate ends of the line.

the Web, have executed a set of temporal queries using the search engine Altavista.
ssary. Each
query measured the number of documents with the given term(s) at the given point in time.

The below figure shows the number of documents with the terms basketball, Computer Science,
and XML. The flat curve for the term basketball validates this strategy: the popularity of basketball
to be roughly stable over this time period. Computer Science takes less and less share of the Web
as the Web shifts from scientific use to everyday use. The share of XML, a popular pre-semantic
web technology seems to grow and stabilize as it becomes a regular part of the toolkit of Web
developers.

Fig2. Number of webpage with the terms basketball, Computer Science, and XML over time
and as a fraction of the number of pages with the term web.

Against this general backdrop there was a look at the share of Semantic Web related terms and
formats, in particular the terms RDF, OWL and the number of ontologies (Semantic Web
Documents) in RDF or OWL. As Figure 1.3.b shows most of the curves have flattened out
after January, 2004. It is not known at this point whether the dip in the share of Semantic

8
 Web is significant. While the use of RDF has settled at a relatively high level, OWL has yet
to break out from a very low trajectory.

Fig3. Number of WebPages with the terms RDF, OWL and the number of ontologies in RDF or
OWL over time. Again, the number is relative to the number of pages with the term web.

The share of the mentioning of Semantic Web formats versus the actual number of Semantic Web
documents using that format. The resulting talking vs. doing curve shows the phenomenon of
technology hype in both the case of XML, RDF and OWL. this is the point where the technology
“makes the press” and after which its becoming increasingly used on the Web.

Fig.4 The hype cycle of Semantic Web related technologies as shown by the number of web pages
about a given technology relative to its usage

The five-stage hype cycle of Gartner Research is defined as follows: The first phase of a Hype
Cycle is the “technology trigger” or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates
significant press and interest. In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-

9
enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a
technology, but there are typically more failures. Technologies enter the “trough of
disillusionment” because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable.
Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through
the “slope of enlightenment” and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application
of the technology. A technology reaches the “plateau of productivity” as the benefits of it become
widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable andevolves in
second and third generations. The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the
technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche market.

tions, hype is unavoidable for the

adoption of network technologies such as the Semantic Web.

not reaching yet the mainstream user and developer community of the Web.

In particular, the adoption of RDF is lagging behind XML, even though it provides a better
alternative and thus many hoped it would replace XML over time.

inspire even more confidence in the corporate world. This could lead an earlier realization of the
vision of the Se mantic Web as a “web of data”, which could ultimately result in a resurgence of
general interest on the Web.

1.4 THE EMERGENCE OF WEB

The Web was a read-only medium for a majority of users. The web of the 1990s was much like
the combination of a phone book and the yellow pages and despite the connecting power of
hyperlinks it instilled little sense of community among its users. This passive attitude toward the
Web was broken by a series of changes in usage patterns and technology that are now referred to
as Web 2.0, a buzzword coined by Tim O’Reilly.

History of web 2.0

These set of innovations in the architecture and usage patterns of the Web led to an entirely
different role of the online world as a platform for intense communication and social interaction.
A recent major survey based on interviews with 2200 adults shows that the internet significantly
improves Americans’ capacity to maintain their social networks despite early fears about the
effects of diminishing real life contact.

Blogs The first wave of socialization on the Web was due to the appearance of blogs, wikis and
other forms of web-based communication and collaboration. Blogs and wikis attracted mass
popularity from around 2003

10
 Fig.5 Development of the social web.

The fraction of web pages with the terms blogs, wiki over time is measured on the left vertical axis.
The fraction of web pages with the terms folk sonomy, XmlHttpRequest and mashup is measured
on the right hand vertical axis.
For adding content to the Web: editing blogs and wikis did not require any knowledge of HTML
any more. Blogs and wikis allowed individuals and groups to claim their personal space on the
Web and fill it with content at relative ease. Even more importantly, despite that weblogs have
been first assessed as purely personal publishing (similar to diaries), nowadays the blogosphere is
widely recognized as a densely interconnected social network through which news, ideas and
influences travel rapidly as bloggers reference and reflect on each other’s postings.

Example: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia The significance of instant messaging (ICQ) is also
not just instant communication (phone is instantaneous, and email is almost instantaneous), but the
ability to see who is online, a transparency that induces a sense of social responsibility.

Social networks
The first online social networks also referred to as social networking services. It entered the field
at the same time as blogging and wikis started to take off. Attracted over five million registered
users followed by Google and Microsoft. These sites allow users to post a profile with basic
information, to invite others to register and to link to the profiles of their friends. The system also
makes it possible to visualize and browse the resulting network in order to discover friends in
common, friends thought to be lost or potential new friendships based on shared interests.

The latest services are thus using user profiles and networks to stimulate different exchanges:
photos are shared in Flickr, bookmarks are exchanged in del.icio.us, plans and goals unite members
at 43Things. The idea of network based exchange is based on the sociological observation that
social interaction creates similarity and vice versa, interaction creates similarity: friends are likely
to have acquired or develop similar interests.

11
User profiles
Explicit user profiles make it possible for these systems to introduce rating mechanism whereby
either the users or their contributions are ranked according to usefulness or trustworthiness. Ratings
are explicit forms of social capital that regulate exchanges in online communities such that
reputation moderates exchanges in the real world. In terms of implementation, the new web sites
are relying on new ways of applying some of the pre-existent technologies. Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML, or AJAX, which drives many of the latest websites is merely a mix of
technologies that have been supported by browsers for years. User friendliness is a preference for
formats, languages and protocols that are easy to use and develop with, in particular script
languages, formats such as JSON, protocols such as REST.
This is to support rapid development and prototyping. For example: flickr Also, borrowing much
of the ideology of the open source software movement, Web 2.0 applications open up their data
and services for user experimentation: Google, Yahoo and countless smaller web sites. through
lightweight APIs content providers do the same with information in the form of RSS feeds. The
results of user experimentation with combinations of technologies are the so-called mashups.
Mashups is a websites based on combinations of data and services provided by others. The best
example of this development are the mashups based on Google’s mapping service such as
HousingMaps.

Web 2.0 + Semantic Web =Web 3.0?

Web 2.0 is often contrasted to the Semantic Web. the ideas of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are
not exclusive alternatives: while Web 2.0 mostly effects how users interact with the Web, while the
Semantic Web opens new technological opportunities for web developers in combiningdata and
services from different sources.
2.0 is that users are willing to provide content as well as metadata. This may take the
form articles and facts organized in tables and categories in Wikipedia, photos organized in sets
and according to tags in Flickr or structured information embedded into homepages and blog
postings using micro formats.

would be willing to provide metadata to bootstrap the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was
originally also expected to be filled by users annotating Web resources, describing their home
pages and multimedia content.

they can do so in a task oriented way and through a user-friendly interface that hides the complexity
of the underlying representation. Micro formats, for example, proved to be more popular due to
the easier authoring using existing HTML attributes.
or personal profile
pages) can encode metadata in micro formats without the user necessarily being aware of it. For
example, blog search engines are able to provide search on the properties of the author or the news
item.
ding ways to encode RDF into HTML pages has resurfaced.
There are also works under way to extend the MediaWiki software behind Wikipedia to allow

12
users to encode facts in the text of articles while writing the text. This additional, machine
processable markup of facts would enable to easily extract, query and aggregate the knowledge of
Wikipedia.
-text authoring with the
collaborative editing of structured information.
hoices, preferences, tastes and social networks of users means that the
new breed of applications are able to build on a much richer user profiles. Clearly, semantic
technology can help in matching users with similar interests as well as matching users with
available content.

 Lastly, in terms of technology what the Semantic Web can offer to the Web 2.0 community is
a standard infrastructure for the building creative combinations of data and services. Standard
formats for exchanging data and schema information, support for data integration, along with
standard query languages and protocols for querying remote data sources provide a platform for
the easy development of mashups.

1.5 STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

1.6 NETWROK ANALYSIS

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the study of social relations among a set of actors. The key
difference between network analysis and other approaches to social science is the focus on
relationships between actors rather than the attributes of individual actors. Network analysis takes
a global view on social structures based on the belief that types and patterns of relationships
emerge from individual connectivity and that the presence (or absence) of such types and patterns
have substantial effects on the network and its constituents. In particular, the network structure
provides opportunities and imposes constraints on the individual actors by determining the transfer
or flow of resources (material or immaterial) across the network.

The focus on relationships as opposed to actors can be easily understood by an example. When
trying to predict the performance of individuals in a scientific community by some measure (say,
number of publications), a traditional social science approach would dictate to look at the attributes
of the researchers such as the amount of grants they attract, their age, the size of the team they
belong to etc. A statistical analysis would then proceed by trying to relate these attributes to the
outcome variable, i.e. the number of publications. In the same context, a networkanalysis study
would focus on the interdependencies within the research community.

For example, one would look at the patterns of relationships that scientists have and the potential
benefits or constraints such relationships may impose on their work. For example, one may
hypothesize that certain kinds of relationships arranged in a certain pattern may be beneficial to
performance compared to the case when that pattern is not present. The patterns of relationships
may not only be used to explain individual performance but also to hypothesize their impact on
the network itself (network evolution). Attributes typically play a secondary role in network studies
as control variables.1 SNA is thus a different approach to social phenomena and therefore requires
a new set of concepts and new methods for data collection and analysis.

13
Network analysis provides a vocabulary for describing social structures, provides formal models
that capture the common properties of all (social) networks and a set of methods applicable to the
analysis of networks in general. The concepts and methods of network analysis are grounded in a
formal description of networks as graphs.

Methods of analysis primarily originate from graph theory as these are applied to the graph
representation of social network data. (Network analysis also applies statistical and probabilistic
methods and to a lesser extent algebraic techniques.) It is interesting to note that the formalization
of network analysis has brought much of the same advantages that the formalization of knowledge
on the Web (the Semantic Web) is expected to bring to many application domains. Previously
vaguely defined concepts such as social role or social group could now be defined on a formal
model of networks, allowing to carry out more precise discussions in the literature and to compare
results across studies.

The methods of data collection in network analysis are aimed at collecting relational data in a
reliable manner. Data collection is typically carried out using standard questionnaires and
observation techniques that aim to ensure the correctness and completeness of network data. Often
records of social interaction (publication databases, meeting notes, newspaper articles, documents
and databases of different sorts) are used to build a model of social networks

1.7 DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

The field of Social Network Analysis today is the result of the convergence of several streams of
applied research in sociology, social psychology and anthropology. Many of the concepts of
network analysis have been developed independently by various researchers often through
empirical studies of various social settings.

For example, many social psychologists of the 1940s found a formal description of social groups
useful in depicting communication channels in the group when trying to explain processes of group
communication. Already in the mid-1950s anthropologists have found network representations
useful in generalizing actual field observations, for example when comparing the level of
reciprocity in marriage and other social exchanges across different cultures.
Some of the concepts of network analysis have come naturally from social studies. In an influential
early study at the Hawthorne works in Chicago, researchers from Harvard looked at the workgroup
behavior (e.g. communication, friendships, helping, controversy) at a specific partof the factory,
the bank wiring room. The investigators noticed that workers themselves used specific terms to
describe who is in “our group”.

The researchers tried to understand how such terms arise by reproducing in a visual way the group
structure of the organization as it emerged from the individual relationships of the factory workers.

2. In another study of mixed-race city in the Southern US researchers looked at the network of
overlapping “cliques” defined by race and age.
3. They also went further than the Hawthorne study in generating hypotheses about the possible
connections between cliques.

14
Despite the various efforts, each of the early studies used a different set of concepts and different
methods of representation and analysis of social networks. However, from the 1950s network
analysis began to converge around the unique world view that distinguishes network analysis from
other approaches to sociological research.

This convergence was facilitated by the adoption of a graph representation of social networks
usually credited to Moreno. What Moreno called a sociogram was a visual representation of social
networks as a set of nodes connected by directed links. The nodes represented individuals in
Moreno’s work, while the edges stood for personal relations. However, similar representationscan
be used to depict a set of relationships between any kind of social unit such as groups,
organizations, nations etc. While 2D and 3D visual modeling is still an important technique of
network analysis, the sociogram is honored mostly for opening the way to a formal treatment of
network analysis based on graph theory.

The following decades have seen a tremendous increase in the capabilities of network analysis
mostly through new applications. SNA gains its relevance from applications and these settings in
turn provide the theories to be tested and greatly influence the development of the methods and the
interpretation of the outcomes. For example, one of the relatively new areas of network analysis is
the analysis of networks in entrepreneurship, an active area of research that builds andcontributes
to organization and management science.
The vocabulary, models and methods of network analysis also expand continuously through
applications that require to handle ever more complex data sets. An example of this process is the
advances in dealing with longitudinal data. New probabilistic models are capable of modeling the
evolution of social networks and answering questions regarding the dynamics of communities.
Formalizing an increasing set of concepts in terms of networks also contributes to both developing
and testing theories in more theoretical branches of sociology.

The increasing variety of applications and related advances in methodology can be best observed
at the yearly Sunbelt Social Networks Conference series, which started in 1980.
4. The field of Social Network Analysis also has a journal of the same name since 1978,
dedicated largely to methodological issues.

5. However, articles describing various applications of social network analysis can be found in
almost any field where networks and relational data play an important role.
While the field of network analysis has been growing steadily from the beginning, there have been
two developments in the last two decades that led to an explosion in network literature. First,
advances in information technology brought a wealth of electronic data and significantly increased
analytical power.
Second, the methods of SNA are increasingly applied to networks other than social networks such
as the hyperlink structure on the Web or the electric grid. This advancement —brought forward
primarily by physicists and other natural scientists— is based on the discovery that many networks
in nature share a number of commonalities with social networks.

15
SIT1610 – Social Network Analysis – Unit I

In the following, we will also talk about networks in general, but it should be clear from the text
that many of the measures in network analysis can only be strictly interpreted in the context of
social networks or have very different interpretation in networks of other kinds.
Fig.6 The upper part shows the location of the workers in the wiring room, while the lower part
is a network image of fights about the windows between workers (W), solderers (S) and inspectors
(I).

The term socialnetwork“” has been introduced by Barnes in 1954. This convergence was
facilitated by the adoption of a graph representation of social networks called as
Sociogram usually credited to Moreno.
Sociogram was a visual representation of social networks as a set of nodes connected by directed
links. The nodes represented individuals while the edges stood for personal relations. The
sociogram is honored mostly for opening the way to a formal treatment of network analysis based
on graph theory.

16
The vocabulary, models and methods of network analysis also expand continuously through
applications that require to handle ever more complex data sets.

An example of this process are the advances in dealing with longitudinal data. New probabilistic
models are capable of modeling the evolution of social networks and answering questions
regarding the dynamics of communities.

Formalizing an increasing set of concepts in terms of networks also contributes to both

developing and testing theories in more theoretical branches of sociology.

While the field of network analysis has been growing steadily from the beginning, there have
been two developments in the last two decades that led to an explosion in network literature

First, advances in information technology brought a wealth of electronic data and significantly
increased analytical power.

Second, the methods of SNA are increasingly applied to networks other than social networks
such as the hyperlink structure on the Web or the electric grid

This advancement is based on the discovery that many networks in nature share a number of
commonalities with social networks.

1.8 KEY CONCEPTS AND MEASURES IN NETWORK ANALYSIS

Social Network Analysis has developed a set of concepts and methods specific to the analysis of
social networks.

1.8.1 The global structure of networks

A Social network can be represented as a Graph G = (V,E) where V denotes finite set of vertices
and E denoted finite set of Edges.
Each graph can be associated with its characteristic matrix M: =(mi,j)n*n where n =|V|

A component is a maximal connected subgraph. Two vertices are in the same (strong) component
if and only if there exists a (directed) path between them.

American psychologist Stanley Milgram experiment about the structure of social networks.
Milgram calculated the average of the length of the chains and concluded that the experiment
showed that on average Americans are no more than six steps apart from each other. While this is
also the source of the expression six degrees of separation the actual number is rather dubious:

17
 Fig. 7 Most network analysis methods work on an abstract,
graph based representation of real world networks.
Formally, what Milgram estimated is the size of the average shortest path of the network, which is
also called characteristic path length. The shortest path between two vertices vs and vt is a paththat
begins at the vertex vs and ends in the vertex vt and contains the least possible number of vertices.
The shortest path between two vertices is also called a geodesic. The longest geodesic in the graph
is called the diameter of the graph: this is the maximum number of steps that is required between
any two nodes. The average shortest path is the average of the length of the geodesics between all
pairs of vertices in the graph.

A practical impact of Milgram’s finding structures is as that possible models for social networks.
The two dimensional lattice model shown in Figure.

Fig.8 The 2D lattice model of networks (left). By connecting the nodes on the opposite
borders of the lattice we get a toroidal lattice (right).
Clustering for a single vertex can be measured by the actual number of the edges between
the neighbors of a vertex divided by the possible number of edges between the neighbors. When
taken the average over all vertices we get to the measure known as clustering coefficient. The
clustering coefficient of tree is zero, which is easy to see if we consider that there are no triangles
of edges (triads) in the graph. In a tree, it would never be the case that our friends are friends

18
with each other.
Fig.9 A tree is a connected graph where there are no loops and paths leading from a
vertex to itself.
The macro-structure of social networks
The image that emerges is one of dense clusters or social groups sparsely connected to each other
by a few ties as shown in Figure 1.7.d. For example, this is the image that appears if we investigate
the co-authorship networks of a scientific community. Bounded by limitations of space and
resources, scientists mostly co-operate with colleagues from the same institute. Occasional
exchanges and projects with researchers from abroad, however, create the kind of shortcut ties that
Watts explicitly incorporated within his model. These shortcuts make it possiblefor scientists to
reach each other in a relatively short number of steps.

Fig.10 Most real world networks show a structure where densely connected
subgroups are linked together by relatively few bridges

Clustering a graph into subgroups allows us to visualize the connectivity at a group level.
Core-Periphery (C/P) structure is one where nodes can be divided in two distinct subgroups:
nodes in the core are densely connected with each other and the nodes on the periphery, while

19
peripheral nodes are not connected with each other, only nodes in the core (see Figure 1.7. e). The
matrix form of a core periphery structure is a

matrix

The result of the optimization is a classification of the nodes as core or periphery and a
measure of the error of the solution.

Fig.11

The structural dimension of social capital refers to patterns of relationships or positions that
provide benefits in terms of accessing large, important parts of the network.
Degree centrality equals the graph theoretic measure of degree, i.e. the number of
(incoming, outgoing or all) links of a node.
Closeness centrality, which is obtained by calculating the average (geodesic) distance of
a node to all other nodes in the network. In larger networks it makes sense to constrain the size of
the neighborhood in which to measure closeness centrality. It makes little sense, for example, to
talk about the most central node on the level of a society. The resulting measure is called local
closeness centrality.
Two other measures of power and influence through networks are broker positions and weak
ties.
Betweenness is defined as the proportion of paths — among the geodesics between all pairs of
nodes—that pass through a given actor.
A structural hole occurs in the space that exists between closely clustered communities.
Lastly, he proves that the structural holes measure correlates with creativity by establishing a linear
equation between the network measure and the individual characteristics on one side of the
equation and creativity on the other side.

20
1.9 WEB BASED NETWORKS
There are two features of web pages that are considered as the basis of extracting
social relations:
links and co-occurrences.

The linking structure of the Web is considered as proxy for real world
relationships as links are chosen by the author of the page and connect
to other information sources that are considered authoritative and
relevant enough to be mentioned.
The biggest drawback of this approach is that such direct links between
personal pages are very sparse: due to the increasing size of the Web
searching has taken over browsing as the primary mode of navigation
on the Web.
As a result, most individuals put little effort in creating new links and
updating link targets or have given up linking to other personal pages
altogether.
Co-occurrences of names in web pages can also be taken as evidence of
relationships and are a
more frequent phenomenon.

On the other hand, extracting relationships based on co-occurrence of

the names of individuals or institutions requires web mining as names
are typically embedded in the natural text of web pages.

Web mining is the application of text mining to the content of web

pages. The techniques employed here are statistical methods possibly
combined with an analysis of the contents of web pages.
Using the search engine Altavista the system collected page counts
for the individual names as well as the number of pages where the
names co-occurred.
Note that this corresponds to a very shallow parsing of the web page as indirect
references are
not counted this way (e.g. the term “the pre with George Bush even if
he was mentioned as the president elsewhere in the text.)

21
Tie strength was calculated by dividing the number of co-occurrences
with the number of pages returned for the two names individually (see
Figure).

Also known as the Jaccard-coefficient, this is basically the ratio of the

sizes of two sets: the intersection of the sets of pages and their union.
The resulting value of tie strength is a number between zero (no co-
occurrences) and one (no separate mentioning, only co-occurrences).
If this number has exceeded a certain fixed threshold it was taken as
evidence for the existence of a tie.

The number of pages that can be found for the given individuals or
combination of individuals. The reason is that the Jaccard-coefficient
is a relative measure of co-occurrence and it does not take into
account the absolute sizes of the sets. In case the absolute sizes are
very low we can easily get spurious results.
A disadvantage of the Jaccard-coefficient is that it penalizes ties
between an individual whose name often occurs on theWeb and less
popular individuals (see Figure 3.4).
In the science domain this makes
it hard to detect, for example, the
ties between famous professors
and their PhD students. In this
case while the name of the
professor is likely to occur on a
large percentage of the pages of
where the name of the PhD
student occurs but not vice versa.

22
 For this reason we use an
asymmetric variant of the
coefficient. In particular, we
divide the number of pages for the
individual with the number of
pages for both names and take it
as evidence of a directed tie if this
number reaches a certain
threshold.
Semantic Similarity-Based Clustering of Web Documents Using
Fuzzy C-Means. International Journal of Computational Intelligence
and Applications 14(3) (2015) 2013

A Hybrid Approach Using PSO and K-Means for Semantic

Clustering of Web Documents. J. Web Eng. 12(3&4): 249-264
(2013)
Associate researchers with topics in a slightly different way. The
system calculates the strength of association between the name of a
given person and a certain topic.
There have been several approaches to deal with name ambiguity.
Instead of a single name they assume to have a list of names related to
each other. They disambiguate the appearances by clustering the
combined results returned by the search engine for the individual
names. The clustering can be based on various networks between the
returned webpages, e.g. based on hyperlinks between the pages,
common links or similarity in content.
The idea is that such key phrases can be added to the search query to
reduce the set of results to those related to the given target individual.
When computing the
weight of a directed link
between two persons.

23
We consider an ordered list of pages for the first person and a set of
pages for the second (the relevant set) as shown in Figure:
There are four different sets: The records which were
retrieved, the records which were not retrieved, the relevant records
and the irrelevant records (as annotated in the test set). The
intersections of these sets (A,B,C,D) represent the following: A
is the number of

irrelevant records not retrieved (true negatives), B is the number of

irrelevant records retrieved(false positives), C is the number of
relevant records not retrieved (false negatives) and D is the number
of relevant records retrieved (true positives). Recall is defined as:
Recall = TP / (TP + F N)
Precision is defined as: Precision = TP / (TP + FP)
We ask the search engine for the top N pages for both persons
but in the case of the second person the order is irrelevant() as the
relevance for at the position compue t n, where rel(n) is 1 if the
document at position n is the relevant set and zero otherwise (1 ≤ n ≤
N).

The average precision method is more sophisticated in that it takes into

account the order in which the search engine returns document for a

24
 person: it assumes that names of other persons that occur closer to the
top of the list represent more important contacts than names that occur
in pages at the bottom of the list.

This strength is determined by taking the number of the pages where

the name of an interest and the name of a person co-occur divided by
the total number of pages about the person.
Assign the expertise to an individual if this value is at least one
standard deviation higher than the mean of the values obtained for the
same concept.
The biggest technical challenge in social network mining is the

disambiguation of person names Persons names exhibit the same

problems of polysemy and synonymy that we have seen in the

general case of web search. Queries for researchers who commonly use different
variations of their name (e.g. Jim Hendler vs. James Hendler).
Polysemy is the association of one word with two or more distinct meanings. A
polyseme is a word or phrase with multiple meanings. In contrast, a one-to-one match
between a word and a meaning is called monosemy. According to some estimates,
more than 40% of English words have more than one meaning.The semantic qualities
or sense relations that exist between words with closely related meanings is
Synonymy.

HISTORICAL OVER VIEW OF PRIVACY AND SECURITY IN

SOCIAL NETWORK
The historical overview of privacy and security in social networks traces
the evolution of these concepts alongside the growth and development of
social networking platforms. Let's explore the key milestones and trends:

1. Early Social Networking Platforms:

Emergence of Social Networking:

Social networking platforms began to emerge in the late 1990s and early
2000s, with platforms like SixDegrees (1997), Friendster (2002), and
MySpace (2003) pioneering the concept of online social interaction.
25
Limited Privacy Controls:

Early social networks had limited privacy controls, with users often
sharing personal information openly on their profiles without robust
mechanisms to control visibility or access.

2. Rise of Privacy Concerns:

Data Breaches and Misuse:

High-profile data breaches and instances of data misuse on social

networks raised concerns about user privacy and security.
Incidents such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook (2018)
highlighted the risks of third-party access to user data without adequate
consent.

Regulatory Responses:

Governments worldwide responded to growing privacy concerns with

regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA),
imposing stricter requirements for data protection and user consent.

3. Evolution of Privacy Controls:

Enhanced Privacy Settings:

Social networking platforms introduced enhanced privacy settings and

controls, allowing users to customize the visibility of their profiles,
posts, and personal information.
Granular privacy controls enabled users to define access levels for
different audiences, such as friends, family, or the public.

Privacy by Design:
26
Platforms adopted privacy by design principles, integrating privacy
features into their product development processes from the outset.
User-centric design and transparency became central tenets, empowering
users to make informed choices about their privacy settings and data
sharing preferences.

4. Focus on Security Measures:

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA):

Social networks introduced two-factor authentication (2FA) as an

additional layer of security to protect user accounts from unauthorized
access.
2FA mechanisms, such as SMS codes, authenticator apps, or biometric
authentication, added an extra barrier against account compromise.
Encryption and Secure Communication:

Platforms implemented encryption protocols and secure communication

channels to protect user data in transit and at rest.
End-to-end encryption for messaging and secure HTTPS connections for
web traffic became standard practices to prevent eavesdropping and data
interception.

5. Privacy and Security Challenges:

Data Privacy Concerns:

Ongoing concerns persist regarding the collection, use, and sharing of

user data by social networking platforms for targeted advertising,
content personalization, and algorithmic decision-making.
Questions arise about the ethical implications of data-driven business
models and the balance between personalized experiences and user
privacy.

27
Emerging Threats:

Social networks face evolving cybersecurity threats, including phishing

attacks, malware distribution, account hijacking, and fake news
propagation.
Platforms invest in proactive security measures, threat intelligence, and
incident response capabilities to detect and mitigate emerging threats in
real-time.

6. Future Directions:

Privacy-Enhancing Technologies:

Adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as differential

privacy, federated learning, and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve user
privacy while enabling data analysis and collaboration.

Regulatory Landscape:

Continued evolution of privacy and data protection regulations

worldwide, with a focus on strengthening user rights, transparency, and
accountability in data processing practices.

User Empowerment:

Greater emphasis on user empowerment through education, awareness,

and participation in privacy and security decision-making.
Platforms prioritize user consent, control, and transparency as essential
pillars of privacy and security governance.

MAJOR PARADIGMS, FOR UNDERSTANDING PRIVACY AND SECURITY

IN SOCIAL NETWORK

Understanding privacy and security in social networks requires consideration of

various paradigms and frameworks that provide insights into the complexities of

28
these concepts within the digital landscape. Here are some major paradigms for
understanding privacy and security in social networks:

1. Contextual Integrity:

Definition:

Contextual integrity, proposed by Helen Nissenbaum, emphasizes the importance

of preserving privacy within specific social contexts or norms.
It argues that privacy violations occur when information flows deviate from
established contextual norms or expectations.

Key Tenets:

Contextual Norms: Privacy norms vary across different social contexts (e.g.,
personal, professional), influencing individuals' expectations regarding information
disclosure and access.
Information Flows: Privacy violations occur when information flows disrupt or
violate established contextual norms, leading to perceived privacy harms.
Purpose and Use: Assessing the appropriateness of information flows requires
considering the purposes for which data is collected, shared, and used within
specific contexts.

2. Control and Consent:

User Control:

The paradigm of user control emphasizes the importance of empowering

individuals to control the collection, use, and sharing of their personal information
on social networks.
Users should have granular control over their privacy settings, visibility
preferences, and data sharing permissions to align with their preferences and
comfort levels.

Informed Consent:

Informed consent involves obtaining explicit and informed consent from users
before collecting, processing, or sharing their personal data on social networks.
Platforms should provide clear and transparent disclosures about data practices,
risks, and potential consequences to enable users to make informed decisions about

29
their privacy.

3. Data Protection Principles:

Fairness and Lawfulness:

Data protection principles emphasize the importance of fair and lawful processing
of personal data on social networks, in compliance with applicable privacy laws
and regulations.
Platforms must adhere to principles of transparency, purpose limitation, data
minimization, accuracy, and accountability in their data processing practices.

Security and Integrity:

Ensuring the security and integrity of user data is essential for maintaining trust
and confidence in social networks.
Platforms must implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to
protect user data from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction.

4. Risk Management:

Risk Assessment:

Risk management approaches involve assessing and mitigating privacy and

security risks associated with data processing activities on social networks.
Platforms must conduct comprehensive risk assessments to identify potential
threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts on user privacy and security.

Mitigation Strategies:

Effective risk mitigation strategies involve implementing controls, safeguards, and

countermeasures to reduce the likelihood and severity of privacy and security
incidents.
Proactive measures such as encryption, access controls, intrusion detection, and
incident response plans help mitigate risks and enhance resilience against cyber
threats.

5. Ethical Considerations:

Ethical Frameworks:

30
Ethical considerations guide decision-making and behavior in the design,
development, and operation of social networks.
Ethical frameworks such as the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence,
autonomy, and justice provide guidance on promoting ethical behavior and
responsible data stewardship.

Social Responsibility:

Social networking platforms have a responsibility to prioritize the well-being and

rights of users, communities, and society at large.
Upholding ethical standards, promoting digital literacy, and fostering inclusive and
safe online environments are essential for fulfilling social responsibilities.

31