[drupal-devel] Google Summer of Code: Social context of content

[vlado]

> 
> The social context of content is important in evaluating content.
I totally agree

It is an interesting and very useful proposal.

I add a few random add-ons and questions complementing your writeup.
They concern more the content neighbourhood, as defined by people
interested in a subject. Some of them might be really tough from
text-mining point of view, but nevertheless I think they are important
to keep things in perspective

> User questions this is trying to answer: 
> Who is the person everybody reads?
> Who was there when the subject of the content happened?   
> What are your friends reading?
> What is relevant for your next social meeting? 
> What it is the socially relevancy of media such as pictures or video?
 Who else is interested in this subject?
 What's new on this subject? veiwpoint?

> The goal of this project is to allow for the descriptions of
> content in a social context and to automatically discover the social
> context of content.  The first phase will be to create a standard set
> of social tags for describing individuals, their relationships, and
> their activities.  These descriptions will be done using the
> taxonomic tagging module in Drupal and it's forthcoming customer
> relationship management module.   The automated discovery of the
> social context of content will be the second phase.   This will allow
> social context to be derived from information that is available but
> not coordinated.  This will include user page views, authorship,
> number of reads, response rate weighting, interaction of buddy list
> contacts, social weight of readers, responders social weight , events,
> locative information, volunteer, and invitation information which are
> all currently available in Drupal modules.


> Why this is innovative?  Content management has currently focused
> on supporting varieties of content, transcoding content, and
> integration of content with other systems but has done little to state
> why it is socially relevant to people.  This project aims to enable
> producers, consumers, and managers of content to describe content in a
> socially relevant manner.  It also aims to discover how users want to
> describe the social context of content and how they prefer to consume
> that information.  Drupal's well defined schema allows for discovery
> of social context in structured data that is presented to users in an
> unstructured way.

> Deliverables
> Part I: Social context tagging
> An open standard for referencing individuals, their relationships,
> and their activities.   This will be an open standard for
> Community Relationship Management based on the CiviCRM open standard,
> SugarCRM, foaf, xfn, rojo (proprietary), aura (codecon 2005), and
> SalesForce for non-profits.
> A database file with this standard taxonomy, and possible folksonomy
> extensions.
> An interface for the module which allows social context tags to
> be effectively displayed with content.
> An interface for allowing users to add social context tags or
> extend their own tags.
> Part II: Automatic discovery of social context.
> A module that drills across content management tables for
> social context information and creates a table with the total social
> context of content nodes.  This will be done in off-line batch modes
> as a series of data warehousing style queries.  This will be
> architected to include queries to other data marts.
Decentralised content discovery? Content propagation? Discovery of a
context neighbourhood?

> 
> Interested Googlers who would benefit from this open source project
> Danah Boyd from Blogger and Ellen Spertus from Orkut would be able to
> benefit from research into social context prototypes.
> 
> 
> Academic references
> This project was inspired at the Computer Human Interaction conference
> 2005.
> One paper from Microsoft described the need for social context of
> content in Microsoft Outlook rather than meta-data such as file size,
> date, and urgency.
> One paper in the short papers section described how a photo of young
> people in a car on a trip could be socially relevant because it could
> have been the author's nephew who died on a similar car trip.  This
> illustrates the power of social context of content.
> A paper from Microsoft analyzing Usenet post meta-data showed that
> power users were most interested in what the most respected people in
> a community were saying.
> References to papers and academic relevancy will be added to this
> proposal.
> 
>