| Welcome to Mining Social Data (MSoDa), a satellite Workshop of the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2008). Overview Social Data are generated by online systems, such as 
 
                  YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Del.icio.us, where  users store data and share experiences. In the recent years we have been  witnessing the rapid development of online social websites and instant  messaging systems. Due to the success of such systems, numerous web users  everyday use the Web as a social medium to interact with other people and to  share their experiences. Social data mining is a new and  challenging aspect of data mining. It is a fast-growing research area, in which connections among and  interactions between individuals are analyzed to understand innovation,  collective decision making, and problem solving, and how the structure of  organizations and social networks impacts these processes. Social data mining  includes various tasks such as the discovery of communities, searching for  multimedia data (images, video, etc) personalization, search methods for social  activities (find friends), text mining for blogs or other fora. Social data  mining finds several applications; for instance, in e-commerce (recommender  systems), in multimedia searching (high volumes of digital photos, videos,  audio recordings) in bibliometrics (publication patterns), in homeland security  (terrorist networks). This workshop  intends to provide a forum for researchers in the field of Data Mining, Machine  Learning and Artificial Intelligence, to discuss the above and other related  topics regarding Social Media.  Workshop Topics  Possible topics of the workshop  include (but are not limited to): Social  network analysisBibliometricsCommunity  discoveryPersonalization  for search and for social interactionRecommender  systemsWeb  mining algorithmsApplications  of social network analysisMining (Collaborative) Tagging  Systems (blogs, wikis, etc.)Mining  social data for multimedia information retrievalOpinion mining 
 Why the topic is of   interest at this time?  User-centric content publishing and management  Web applications (also known as Web 2.0 applications), such as wikis, web logs  (blogs), and resource sharing systems, have been constantly developing and  maturing in the last few years. Now that the hype of Web 2.0 is over, several  limitations of social media have surfaced, such as information redundancy  (synonymous tags), noise, ambiguity (polysemous tags) and spam. It is therefore  now the right time for the application of sophisticated machine learning, data  mining, information retrieval, information extraction, semantic Web and natural  language processing algorithms that will improve the search for content, the  navigation within the content and the overall user experience in these systems.   |