The purpose of the current research is to provide a performance appraisal system capable of considering the value chain network structure of research and development (R&D) projects for Complex products and systems (CoPS) under uncertainty of data. Therefore, in order to achieve this goal, a network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) approach and the possibilistic programming to provide a new fuzz...

Typically, virtual communities exhibit the well-known phenomenon of participation inequality, which means that only a small percentage of users is responsible of the majority of contributions. However, the sustainability of the community requires that the group of active users must be continuously nurtured with new users that gain expertise through a participation process. This paper analyzes t...

In knowledge management (KM), one perspective is that knowledge resides in individuals who interact in groups. Concepts as communities-ofpractice, knowledge networks, and “encultured knowledge” as the outcome of shared sense-making (Blackler, 1995) are built upon this perspective. Social network analysis focuses on the patterns of people’s interactions. This adds to KM theory a dimension that c...

Social network analysis has been one of the most influential scientific revolutions of the past century. Its success has been due, in part, to its methodological sophistication and the emphasis it places on identifying and clearly depicting features of social structure. As such, social network analysis is often viewed in stark contrast to the structuralist paradigm that dominated the social sci...

Social Network Analysis (SNA) tries to understand and exploit the key features of social networks in order to manage their life cycle and predict their evolution. Increasingly popular web 2.0 sites are forming huge social network. Classical methods from social network analysis (SNA) have been applied to such online networks. In this paper, we propose leveraging semantic web technologies to merg...

How can individuals and communities protect their privacy against social network analysis tools? How do criminals or terrorists organizations evade detection by such tools? Under which conditions can these tools be made strategy proof? These fundamental questions have attracted little attention in the literature to date, as most social network analysis tools are built around the assumption that...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate the activity features in measuring the influence of member activities on the social network evolution. Conventional methods analyze social networks and make predictions based on all cumulative members and activities. However, since inactive members do not contribute to the network growth, including them in analysis can lead to less accur...

This paper describes a Social Network Analysis toolkit to monitor an Enterprise Social Network and help analyzing informal leadership as a function of social ties and topic discussions. The toolkit has been developed in the context of a regional project, Fiordaliso, funded by Regione Lazio (a region of central Italy) and leaded by Reply, an international network of specialized companies in the ...

Research on happiness has been conducted for many decades with various interesting results reported by different groups of researchers. While there is a plethora of research efforts on happiness in general, there is little work being done to study the effects of online social networks on happiness. This is mainly due to the relative (in)maturity of online social networking as it has only been a...

As Social Network Sites (SNS) permeate our daily routines, the question whether participation results in value for SNS users becomes particularly acute. This study adopts a 'participation-source-outcome' perspective to explore how distinct uses of SNS generate various types of social capital benefits. Building on existing research, extensive qualitative findings and an empirical study with 253 ...