The
overall strategy considers a methodology of working based on combining
the theoretical studies with case studies. This process will provide new
ideas and theories with specific use cases and, subsequently from the
specific to the general, create a computational model to represent these
theories and to check its validity and usefulness. That iswhat is
called an iterative design process. It permits to create models and
systems, combining theory with practice. Also lets to articulate partial
solutions that will help to build tools that are evaluated meanwhile
they are been developed. From this work, the partial software tools will
be part of the SISOB system.
Each of the case studies will be based on a general methodology. Below we briefly summarize the main activities involved in this work:
- Construction of a model, identifying actors, communities and social networks relevant to the objectives of the study, the links between them, together with electronic data sources making it possible to identify and quantify these links. Definition of social indicators as measures of the impact of relations, knowledge transfer and SNA measures.
- Automated collections of data from relevant electronic sources (databases of curricula, blogs on the WWW, private data on the review process in a major scientific publishing house). The crawler programs expand the initial electronic data sources of the Web by following the hyperlinks within them to obtain new data sources. This expansion is done with the new data sources until enough information is available.
- Use of the data to instantiate the model. The data preprocessing is the first task in this activity, to be performed with common text mining methods like stop word removal, stemming and named entity recognition, among others.
- Computation of social indicators, characterizing the social network(s) described by the model.
- Categorization of the different social networks identified by this work and of significant differences between them.

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