Aims and Goals of the Workshop

In social networking maps can greatly improve the users perception of the social environment through the visual representation of other people's social properties and of the relations inside a community. Maps improve also interaction among users, who are able to visually identify and relate each other. Maps are particularly useful as a real-time representation of the social environment dynamics, and for localizing events such as meetings, entertainement, public places, that can affect the virtual community evolution. Maps can also be the expression of a general social 'mood' of a part of the environment, derived for example from an interpolation of events related to the locations of the humans participating to the social network (such as a map of the risks associated to different areas of the city). This one-day workshop aims at answering a number of open questions related to the use of maps for representing the social environment and interacting with it: ∞ Which are the most useful social parameters that the map representation can efficiently communicate to the users? ∞ Which are the social communication and interaction processes that can be effectively improved by a map based approach? ∞ Which are the tools that can enable the user to seamlessly communicate the modification of his/her social parameters? ∞ Which is the role of geographical versus conceptual maps in dealing with people physical and emotional neighborhood? ∞ How can individual parameters be integrated and interpolated to visualize a (possibly evolving) social 'mood' of the network? ∞ How can novel visualization and interaction techniques improve the perception of the user social environment? ∞ How is the development of context-aware and ubiquitous systems contributing to improve the map based interaction to discover and access social services? ∞ Which are the privacy concerns related to the representation of the social environment? ∞ While most people agree that individual data should not be shared without the user consent, what about the communication through a graphical map of the social mood of a certain environment? Topics The workshop addresses both theoretical and practical issues related to the above questions, providing an opportunity to discuss both the state-of-the art and the expectations in the definition and use of maps for social interaction. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to): ∞ Models for visualization of social networks ∞ Map design and visualization ∞ Social parameters representation