Floriana Gargiulo - Models on and of the web

Two main modeling categories concern social networks. On one side there are the approaches aimed to model the graph evolution in order to understand the morphogenesis of the important topological structures (degree heterogeneity, clustering, etc.). On the other side there is a large tradition of modeling that envisage to understand the role of network structures in important propagation phenomena, like epidemics, viral marketing, etc. One of the general difficulties, for modeling approaches in social science is to embed simulations in the real world. The semantic web can open new streets in this kind of interdisciplinary approaches being at the same time a potential infinite source of social-information (that has to be mined and analyzed with ad-hoc techniques) and an important benchmark for social-modeling. I will show some possible research scenarios that can be envisaged in this framework.