Visit me, click me, be my friend: an analysis of evidence networks of user relationships in BibSonomy

The ongoing spread of online social networking and sharing sites has reshaped the way how people interact with each other. Analyzing the relatedness of different users within the resulting large populations of these systems plays an important role for tasks like user recommendation or community detection. Algorithms in these fields typically face the problem that explicit user relationships (like friend lists) are often very sparse. Surprisingly, implicit evidences (like click logs) of user relations have hardly been considered to this end. Based on our long-time experience with running BibSonomy [4], we identify in this paper different evidence networks of user relationships in our system. We broadly classify each network based on whether the links are explicitly established by the users (e.g., friendship or group membership) or accrue implicitly in the running system (e.g., when user u copies an entry of user v). We systematically analyze structural properties of these networks and whether topological closeness (in terms of the length of shortest paths) coincides with semantic similarity between users. Our results exhibit different characteristics and. provide preparatory work for the inclusion of new (and less sparse) information into the process of optimizing community detection or user recommendation algorithms.