The Structure of Social Documents

Abstract

Enterprise collaboration platforms are large scale, highly integrated information infrastructures that enable many hundreds of employees to work collaboratively and share information. In this paper, we lay the theoretical and analytical foundations for the use of social documents as digital traces of collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration platforms. Through a review of related research and an empirical analysis of social documents, we identify key concepts and structures, providing the foundation for the Social Document Ontology (SocDOnt). SocDOnt expresses the generic structure of social documents and extends previous work in two important ways. At the micro-level a social document is defined as a composition of an intellectual entity enhanced by both intellectual and simple components and at the macro-level a collection is defined as an aggregation of social documents. These analytical constructs enable a more nuanced and granular analysis of social documents to understand collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration platforms.

Visualizing Social Documents as Traces of Collaborative Activity in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms

“…On the presentation layer, we examined the user interface and derived the terminology used within UniConnect for the description of social documents (intellectual entities and components), containers and spaces and mapped these terms to the corresponding concepts from SocDOnt [29]. Table 1 shows the mapping of concrete classes from SocDOnt to the types of spaces and containers available in UniConnect.…”

“…To achieve this, we designed an examination tool (shown in Table 2), that uses concepts from SocDOnt [29] and is guided by the first three dimensions of the Social Collaboration Analytics Framework (SCA) [23]. For each module in UniConnect, we identified the space (SCA: where) and the container (SCA: content type) in which a user can create items (SCA: content components).…”

“…To achieve this goal first requires an understanding of the structure and nature of social documents. In our previous work [29] we conducted an in-depth analysis of the structure of social documents and derived a generic model (the Social Document Ontology -SocDOnt) to describe their structure. In this paper, we build on this foundational work on the semantic structure of social documents to develop methods for their visualization and analysis in order to better understand collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration platforms.…”

“…and likes. Focusing on a more detailed and technical description, the Social Document Ontology (SocDOnt) provides an ontology for the generic modelling of social documents and their structure on both, a micro-level (composition) and a macro-level (relations between and aggregations of social documents) [29]. As SocDOnt is based on and aligned with well-established ontologies from the field of web science and semantic web, it makes use of standardized terminology and existing concepts and provides the theoretical foundation for the graph representation and visualization of social documents presented in this paper.…”

Metrics for Analyzing Social Documents to Understand Joint Work

“…In Phase 2, metrics were developed based on the structure of social documents as traces of (joint) user activity. SocDOnt, an existing ontology for social documents [45], was used to develop metrics that span multiple containers for social documents. In Phase 3, we applied these metrics to a (purposefully selected) sample of 12 workspaces on a large-scale integrated collaboration platform with more than 3000 users representing more than 40 organizations.…”