Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Barbara Carminati and Elena Ferrari
(a) Social network at the time of central node
creation
(b) Created membership and user to user links
Figure 1: Establishing organizational links on a social network
The organization aims connecting to all users who share values of the organization. Furthermore, the
organization increases inbreeding homophily by helping users connect to each other. Similarly, the
organization works in advancing its values by gaining new users to the cause. Figure 1(b) shows the
newly created membership and user to user links. In the ideal case, the organization can connect to
all users who share its values and recruit new members for the cause.
5.2 Operations and evolution
As members are the main asset of a virtual organization, we will first discuss definitions and
evolutions of member roles.
Member roles. A value homophily based virtual organization consists of regular members,
administrative members that are chosen from members, and organization administrators. Organization
administrators are paid workers or owners of an organization which wants to create a virtual
organization on social networks. In creation of regular member roles, we define two major factors:
location and user attributes. Depending on the count of members in locations, the organization can
establish local groups for each geographic location.
Differing from location, user attributes offer more semantic variety for group creation. For example,
education history can be used to group users according to their education levels. Similarly, work
history can be used to create groups of users who share the same profession, such as engineer,
medical doctor or teacher.
Each location and attribute group is governed by a selected member who acts as an administrator. In
administrative member selection, a reputation score can be computed for each member and the most
reputed member can be selected for administrative tasks. In this paper, we will not discuss this
process. Instead, we refer the reader to a widely used reputation system in social networks (Sabater
and Sierra 2002).
In user to group relations, each user can be a member of multiple groups based on profile attributes,
location or a combination of both. For example, members can be divided into groups based on their
home countries, and each one of these groups can be further divided into attribute groups. For
example, in this scenario, the organization can select German medical doctors.
Interactions. Member interactions on a virtual organization (Ardichvili 2008) serves the purpose of
increasing the inbreeding homophily. In simpler terms, it involves getting members together to create
friendship links among them. For this purpose, the VHO provides an information pool to automatically
share member generated content. On Facebook, this content includes links to articles, videos and
such. This content is received by the Facebook application from member profiles. Additionally, this pool
can be used to publicize organization related information. For example, administrators can share a link
to the latest budget proposal of the organization.
Search. For timely deployment of human resources (Xu et al. 2008), filtering is used to locate groups of
members and assign tasks to them under supervision of administrators. Through an organization
policy, members can also be allowed to use attribute and location based filtering to locate other groups
and members. However, in such a scenario user privacy should not be violated.
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