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Social Networks

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Definition

A social network is a social structure made of actors, which are discrete individual, corporate or collective social units like persons or departments [19] that are tied by one or more specific types of relation or interdependency, such as friendship, membership in the same organization, sending of messages, disease transmission, web links, airline routes, or trade relations. The actors of a social network can have other attributes, but the focus of the social network view is on the properties of the relational systems themselves [19]. For many applications social networks are treated as graphs, with actors as nodes and ties as edges. A group is the finite set of actors the ties and properties of whom are to be observed and analyzed. In order to define a group it is necessary to specify the network boundaries and the sampling. Subgroups consist of any subset of actors and the (possible) ties between them.

The science of social networks utilizes methods from general network...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany

    Felix Schwagereit & Steffen Staab

Authors
  1. Felix Schwagereit
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  2. Steffen Staab
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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Schwagereit, F., Staab, S. (2009). Social Networks. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1226

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