Abstract. On the Semantic Web ontologies are most commonly treated as artifacts created by knowledge engineers for a particular community. The task of the engineers is to forge a common understanding within the community and to formalize the agreements, prerequisites of reusing domain knowledge in information systems. However, the process of objectifying ontologies results in ontological drift over time (as the community and its understanding evolves independently of the agreement) and results in the loss of local views over the domain. Several authors have suggested emergent semantics as a solution [1]. The idea of emergent semantics is to define the ontology as an emergent feature of a system of autonomous agents acting in dynamic, open environments. Besides an agreement over the kind of environment in which emergence could be observed, there is little common ground in what emergence would constitute. We have proposed elsewhere that the first step towards emergent semantics

We examine the dynamic formation and stochastic evolution of networks connecting individuals. The payoff to an individual from an economic or social activity depends on the network of connections among individuals. Over time individuals form and sever links connecting themselves to other

Online social networking sites like Orkut, YouTube, and Flickr are among the most popular sites on the Internet. Users of these sites form a social network, which provides a powerful means of sharing, organizing, and finding content and contacts. The popularity of these sites provides

Given a snapshot of a social network, can we infer which new interactions among its members are likely to occur in the near future? We formalize this question as the link-prediction problem, and we develop approaches to link prediction based on measures for analyzing the “proximity” of nodes in a

The intuitive background for measures of structural centrality in social networks is reviewed aPzd existing measures are evaluated in terms of their consistency with intuitions and their interpretability. Three distinct intuitive conceptions of centrality are uncovered and existing measures

and the diagrammatic technique is given. Some implications for data integrity, infor-mation retrieval, and data manipulation are discussed. The entity-relationship model can be used as a basis for unification of different views of data: t,he network model, the relational model, and the entity set model. Semantic

) formulate a unified model that integrates elements across the eight models, and (4) empirically validate the unified model. The eight models reviewed are the theory of reasoned action, the technology acceptance model, the motivational model, the theory of planned behavior, a model combining the technology

We study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks, when selfinterested individuals can form or sever links. First, for two stylized models, we characterize the stable and efficient networks. There does not always exist a stable network that is efficient. Next, we show

Models for the processes by which ideas and influence propagate through a social network have been studied in a number of domains, including the diffusion of medical and technological innovations, the sudden and widespread adoption of various strategies in game-theoretic settings, and the effects

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