CFP: ICFCA workshop on social network analysis & concept lattices

[Camille Roth]

(apologies for cross-posting)

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ICFCA 2007 Workshop "Social Network Analysis and Conceptual  
Structures: Exploring Opportunities"
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http://camille.roth.free.fr/confs/icfcasna.html

in conjunction with The 5th International Conference on Formal  
Concept Analysis (ICFCA 2007)
February 12-16, 2007; Clermont-Ferrand, France
http://www.isima.fr/icfca07/


CALL FOR PAPERS

The recent years have seen a renewed interest in an interdisciplinary  
effort aiming at analyzing social networks, in which both  
mathematical sociology and computer science play a key role, relying  
altogether extensively on graph theory. This effort has mainly been  
fueled and supported by significant advances in computing  
capabilities and electronic data availability for several social  
systems: scientists, webloggers, online customers, computer-based  
collaboration-enhancing devices, inter alia.

In particular, knowledge networks, i.e. interaction networks where  
agents produce or exchange knowledge, are the focus of many current  
studies, both qualitative and quantitative. Among these, community- 
detection issues such as finding agents sharing sets of identical  
patterns are a key topic. Social network analysis is proficient in  
methods aimed at discovering, describing, and plausibly organizing  
various kinds of social communities.

At the same time, conceptual structures can yield a fruitful insight  
in this regard, be it in relation to affiliation networks (actors  
belonging to the same organizations, participating in identical  
events) or to epistemic communities (i.e. agents dealing with  
identical topics, such as scientific communities or weblogs). And,  
indeed, some applications of concept (or Galois) lattices in  
sociology have been proposed since the early 1990s; yet, in that  
context social aspects of community structures are usually of prime  
interest: leaders, peripheral members, cooperation within and between  
different groups.

On the other hand, conceptual structures are typically focused around  
taxonomies -- possibly useful to describe actors in terms of centers  
of interest, for instance -- rather than focused on interactions.  
More broadly, notions pertaining to social network analysis seem  
presently to remain somehow outside the mainstream research of the  
concept lattice community.

The aim of this workshop is to investigate the opportunities for  
formal concept analysis in social networks by proposing possible  
bridges between these frameworks and by presenting issues of  
mathematical sociology which could benefit from conceptual  
structures, so as to eventually facilitate collaboration between the  
two fields. Therefore, we particularly welcome submissions of the  
survey type describing the state of the art in any of the fields  
listed below along with submissions specifying a concrete problem  
that still needs an efficient solution. Submissions may but do not  
have to address the possible use of formal concept analysis in these  
fields.


TARGET AUDIENCE

Social scientists using or willing to use formal techniques in any of  
the fields listed below; researchers in discrete structures and  
formal concept analysis interested in applications in social sciences.


TOPICS

   Knowledge networks / epistemic networks
   Collective construction of knowledge, social cognition
   Social epistemology applied to social networks
   Social network analysis of communities of practice
   Information diffusion in social networks
   Affiliation networks
   Social network-based methods for community detection
   Web communities, open-source development communities
   Web blog analysis
   Social networking websites
   Collaboration-enhancing tools (in organizations, on the web, inter  
alia)
   Knowledge exchange devices
   Semantic web and social networks
   Knowledge management using social data
   Building semantics from collaborative environments
   Taxonomies and ontologies for scientific domains
   Network analysis for folksonomies
   Systems for folksonomy building
   Evolution of network structures


SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Papers no longer than 16 pages should be submitted no later than  
January 5, 2007 to sna.fca at gmail.com in Adobe PDF or Postscript  
format. Papers should also be formatted according to the official  
formatting guidelines of the main conference (LNCS). Short papers are  
also welcome.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: January 5, 2007
Notification of acceptance: January 22, 2007


ORGANIZERS

Sergei Obiedkov (Higher School of Economics, Russia)  -   
sergei.obj at gmail.com
Camille Roth (University of Modena, Italy & CREA/CNRS, France)  -   
roth at shs.polytechnique.fr


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

   Alain Degenne (CNRS, France)
   Vincent Duquenne (University of Paris VI/CNRS, France)
   Peter Eklund (University of Wollongong, Australia)
   Linton C. Freeman (UC Irvine, USA)
   Andreas Hotho (University of Kassel, Germany)
   Jeffrey H. Johnson (Open University, UK)
   Cliff Joslyn (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)
   Sergei Kuznetsov (Higher School of Economics & VINITI, Russia)
   Amedeo Napoli (LORIA/CNRS, France)
   Jean Sallantin (LIRMM/CNRS, France)
   Gerd Stumme (University of Kassel, Germany)