Understanding and forecasting the health of an online community is of great value to its owners and managers who have vested interests in its longevity and success. Nevertheless, the association between community evolution and the behavioural patterns and trends of its members is not clearly understood, which hinders our ability of making accurate predictions of whether a community is flourishi...

Websites of a particular class form increasingly complex networks, and new tools are needed to map and understand them. A way of visualizing this complex network is by mapping it. A map highlights which members of the community have similar interests, and reveals the underlying social network. In this paper, we will map a network of websites using Kohonen’s self-organizing map (SOM), a neural-n...

The global information service in the Internet is a heterogeneous and rapidly evolving environment. Constantly, new information services are added, others are modified, removed or in fault, making it more and more intractable to maintain a coherent image of the information environment. Moreover, users’ interests and demands for information services are rapidly changing. In this paper we propose...

Psychological research has established that unemployment causes widespread psychological distress and ill health in communities but, arguably, little of this research is truly community psychological. In this paper we sketch out a critical community psychological perspective and use it to contribute to understanding of the role of psychosocial aspects of income in the experience and mental heal...

Characterizing and understanding behavior and interests of social media members is crucial for enhancing several practical applications in this environment, such as target marketing or recommendation. Aiming to characterize and exploit such behavior and interests, this work proposes Someato, a novel online analytics tool. Besides a characterization methodology, Someato comprises a search and a ...

Although African American families are at particular risk for obesity and its associated health comorbidities, few interventions have directly targeted low-income members of this group living in subsidized public housing. Using a consensual qualitative research approach, we conducted 11 interviews with African American mothers living in two public housing communities to enhance understanding of...

A Web Based Virtual Community is an example of a Collaborative Virtual Environment, which focalizes in providing collaborative functionalities and both synchronous and asynchronous interaction services. This paper describes a virtual community, which aims to meet the requirements of a virtual collaboration space and support autonomous and collaborative e-learning services. In particular, a web-...