Social Interaction in Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 159

Chapter 7
Social Interaction in Databases

Antonio Badia

7.1 Introduction

The advent of the social web has made user-generated content a focus of research.
Such content is already available in the form of tags, blogs, comments, etc., in many
Web sites. Experience with social Web sites has shown that users tend to have a say
about the data: they may interpret the same data in somewhat different ways, or
may be able to add detail to it, enriching the existing contents. When users are able to
enter information in a format-free manner, they tend to do so and may provide
additional semantics to the data. The success of tagging clearly indicates that users
are willing to provide content when this can be done in a manner that is natural to the
users. Past research shows that the tags that users add to items in manyWeb sites are,
as a whole, excellent descriptors of the contents of the items themselves and can be
fruitfully used for several tasks, like improving search or clustering of the item set
[ 1 - 3 ]. Overall, the amount of user-created content is growing at a fast rate.
Databases would seem a perfect place for social interaction, since basically any
database is created and designed with a group of users in mind; very few databases
are for a single, particular user. However, in a database the interaction with the user
is strictly regulated and constrained. The database is usually planned in a centra-
lized manner by a person or small team of people who try to anticipate the needs of
the user community and come up with a database design. In the context of relational
databases, this includes the database schema, that is, the set of tables (and attributes
per table) that will store the information. Access to the database is regulated in a
centralized manner too, with a database administrator (DBA) in charge of giving
users permissions. These permissions may be read permissions (user can see the
data, but not change it) and write permissions (users can add, delete, or change
data). Write permissions are usually restricted. Also, it is very infrequent that users
are given permission to alter the database schema (as opposed to the data). Thus, the