Why social graphs at Defrag? Because there are very few collaborative “aha moments” in solitude.

(and it will have legs for at least 3 more years

Now if there were semantics associated with each arc and some of it can be built automatically (say based on who you exchange emails with often), then the graph becomes immensely powerful in you reaching different “views” of your graph for different purposes!

Now that would be a very powerful Social Graph!

Graphs have been studied and applied for decades, at least back to Ford and Fulkerson.

This history shows that can’t expect that one ‘graph’ will represent more than a tiny fraction of ‘everything’, even about people!

E.g., what do the arcs mean? There are many quite different things they might mean, even just in ‘social graphs’.

But, the idea of ‘social graphs’ does begin to move in a direction of progress: For far too long, the ‘technology’ in applications of ‘information technology’ has been little more than routine software development. Or, compared with good salaries in the US, computers are cheap, and there were a lot of manual tasks ripe to be computerized with routine software development. Good.

But we might want more: Standing back a little, we take in some available data and want to manipulate it to get some valuable results. So, how to do the manipulations? Routine software development doesn’t say. Really, mostly computer science doesn’t say, either. To say, a good direction is to find an appropriate ‘framework’ for the manipulations. At times, graph theory is such a framework.

E.g., there is

Ravindra K. Ahuja, Thomas L. Magnanti, James B. Orlin ‘Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications’, ISBN 0-13-617549-X, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1993.

with quite a lot of nice applications, including even to tomography!

E.g., which salesman goes to which customers and sells what products in what order and leaves how many free samples? Surprise! Except for a little Lagrangian relaxation, this can be done just with network flows, and the flow part can go very quickly.

Okay, some ‘incoming’ warheads have been sighted. Now, which missiles should be aimed at what warheads? Yup, there’s a network (graph) problem here! For more, start at Winter Street and go a little further clockwise!

There are also other ‘frameworks’ that solve other problems, including some having to do with people!

The notion of social graph has me breathless

thanks. But it will steal from my last surfing day ( real surfing that is, here in truro)