The Social Web is composed of various applications, such as Wikipedia, Flickr, twitter, and del.icio.us, in which decentralized and collaborative forms of organizing information production emerge. Understanding the dynamics and evolution of the inherent social and informational structures is essential to build new virtual communities and their applications, to improve existing infrastructures, and to evaluate the success of available services.
In my research, I am currently dealing specifically with the analysis of Wikis (i.e. Wikipedia). I am applying various techniques from network analysis, data mining and text mining in order to investigate such virtual communities. A universal actor content-element model serves as the methodical foundation for exploring the temporal dynamic in social and information networks.
Besides, I have realized how increasingly important the visualization of data and information are. An essential understanding of the fundamental rules for effectively expressing information using graphical techniques is part of my research. Here I am especially interested in the possibilities to apply programming language Processing in the field of Visual Analytics.
Important results are integrated into the open source software application SONIVIS, which was published in 2008. The software facilitates the exploration of social and informational networks. It is based on a generic model and, therefore, data from different communities (e.g. MediaWiki-based Wikis, Bibsonomy) can be transformed by a mapping specification.
Furthermore, I am dealing with the multidimensional time-based analysis of evolving networks in open source software (OSS) communities. Activity sequences are especially investigated in order to compare them with the current life cycle phase of a given project in order to specify the maturity degree. This might help potential users of OSS to estimate the sustainability and risks of a given project.