online communities: visualization and formalization

Online Communities:Visualization and Formalization

Prof. Jonathan P. BowenMuseophile Limited, Oxford, UK

www.jpbowen.com

Abingdon School

3rd win in a row at Henley Royal Regatta on 7th July 2013, breaking previous record time.

Overview

• Online communities

• Visualization tools

• Formalization in Z

• Community of Practice

• Application to cybersecurity?

Communities• Community of Practice

(CoP) – collection of peopledeveloping domain knowledge

• Different communities– cybersecurity, Z notation, visualization, ...

• Body of Knowledge (BoK)– ontology for a particular domain

• Interdisciplinarity vs. Multidisciplinarity

Types of community• CoP on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Community_of_practice• Online CoP (OCoP): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Online_community_of_practice

Other types of community• Virtual community: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Category:Virtual_communities• Community of interest: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Community_of_interest

Example – two communities (arts and science)

Facebook TouchGraph connections

Visualization

Top 30 co-authors as measured by the number of publications

Academic Search

co-author graph

Academic Search citation graph• Top 34 authors by number of citations

Supervisors and studentsAlonzo Church and Alan Turing

Academic Search

genealogy graph

See alsoMathematics Genealogywebsite

The Erdős number• Paul Erdős (1913–1996)

– Hungarian mathematician– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős– Erdős number 0– Co-authored over 1,000 publications

• 511 co-authors– Erdős number 1– Co-authors of Erdős co-authors

• Erdős number 2• Etc.

Academic Search

co-author path

Robin Wilson, mathematician and co-author/editor(Erdős number 1)

Links to chair

Jonathan Bowen and David Llewellyn-Jones via Carlos Delgado Kloos andMadjid Merabti

Links by co-authorship

Jonathan Bowen and ...

Formalization in Z• Sets of names of people and communities

State 1• Links between people• Memberships of communities

State 2• People without links to others• Entities with no community membership• People with no links to them from others

State 3• Stronger constraints

State 4• People are not linked to themselves• Communities cannot be (transitively)

members of themselves

• ...+ is irreflexive transitive closure

State 5• Top-level communities

• People are linked in some way

Status operation• People (output linked!) directly linked from

a particular person (input p?)

• (|...|) is relational image

Status operation

• People (common!) directly linked from two other specific people (p1? and p2?)

Status operation

• Communities (transitively) associated with a particular person (p?)

Community of Practice (CoP)Social sciences concept• Wenger, E.: Communities of Practice:

Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)

• Wenger, E., McDermott, R.A., Snyder, W.: Cultivating Communities of Practice: A guide to managing knowledge. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (2002)

• A brief introduction by Etienne Wenger, 2006: www.ewenger.com/theory

Fundamental elements of a CoP1. Domain: Common interest to be

effective. E.g., cybersecurity.2. Community: Group of people willing

to engage with others. E.g., security experts, technology experts, sociologists, etc.

3. Practice: Explore existing and develop new knowledge. Use of security and networked IT expertise.

Stages of community development

1. Potential

2. Coalescing

3. Maturing

4. Stewardship

5. Transformation

Cultivating a CoP1. Design a CoP to evolve naturally. 2. Create opportunities for open discussion.3. Welcome and allow different levels of

participation.

The Dark Side ...

The project that dares not speak its name ...

Conclusion

Prof. Jonathan Bowenjonathan.bowen@lsbu.ac.uk

www.jpbowen.com

• Online communities• Visualization tools• Formalization (e.g., in Z)• Community of Practice (CoP)• Application to cybersecurity?

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