A social information flow graph: Design and prototypical implementation

Companies are increasingly turning to Enterprise 2.0 technologies to harness collective intelligence for information management and analysis. In this context, social network analysis (SNA) provides insights into which knowledge workers interact with which information assets and thus improves cooperation among them. However, current approaches to SNA disregard semantic relationships between the information assets or the relevance of the applicability of SNA by end-users. In the paper at hand we address this issue by proposing the social information flow graph (SIFG) as a tool for end-user-oriented SNA. In this sense, the SIFG provides a holistic and social perspective on relationships between individuals and information assets within an Enterprise 2.0 environment. We showcase its technical applicability by a prototypical implementation. By conducting case studies in three different application domains, we show that the SIFG and its explorability enable novel opportunities and use cases for end-user-oriented SNA.