Multimedia Social Network modeling: a proposal

In this paper we present a preliminary work concerning the definition of a novel data model for Multimedia Social Networks (MSNs), i.e. networks that combine information on users belonging to one or more social communities together with the multimedia content that is generated and used within a related environment. The proposed model is based on the hypergraph structure and allows us to represent in a simple way all the different kinds of relationships that are typical of a social network, in particular between multimedia content, between users and multimedia content and between users themselves, at the same time supporting several kinds of applications by means of the introduction of several ranking functions. In addition, we provide a strategy for mapping the proposed model into an object relational data model, for efficiently storing the related data. We also describe a first prototype that can store and integrate information from different OSNs (Facebook, Twitter) and multimedia sharing systems (Flickr, Lastfm), providing some facilities for browsing the entire hypergraph.