Lotus Instant Messaging/ Web Conferencing ... - IBM Redbooks

OverviewSocial network analysis and the ideas around it have been around for manyyears. A major problem in the field has been in collecting the raw data. Socialnetworks revolve around social communication, which is innately difficult torecord. Interactions between two individuals (or a group of individuals) meeting inperson are difficult to record, and it is practically impossible to automate suchrecording. Electronic communication is, however, intrinsically easy to record. Asmore of the world’s communication takes electronic form, an opportunity arisesto record an increasing amount of human interaction.Instant messaging is the ideal electronic communication medium over which toextract information about human interaction. Unlike e-mail, messagesexchanged between people are nearly always of interest to those people.E-mails are often sent out en masse to many different people, countless of whomwill have little or no interest in its content. IM communication is more informal,and people use it in place of face-to-face or telephone communication, whichmeans it is likely to be used for a wider variety of communication than e-mail.Visualizing Sametime (VS) was designed as a proof of concept system to showthat social network graphs and analysis could be generated from instantmessaging (IM) traffic.ArchitectureThe following sections discuss the different components and overall architectureof the Visualizing Sametime system.OutlineThe Visualizing Sametime (VS) system is based on a client/server model andconsists of three primary components (Figure A-1 on page 431):1. Visualizing Sametime client2. Visualizing Sametime server3. Regular Sametime server430 Lotus Instant Messaging/Web Conferencing (Sametime): Building Sametime-Enabled Applications