Social Interaction in Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 164

(i.e., data). Finally, the user proceeds to link the table with an outside resource
which contains similar information, the Getty thesaurus of geographic names ,

by attaching to the table its URL. 2

7.4 General Framework

Our goal is to develop the concept of , defined as a database that

handles user-created content and enables user-user interaction. There are two main
issues on social databases:
l Handling user input in a way that is convenient and meaningful to the user,
including (but not limited to) annotations that a user may wish to create over
same data or metadata in the database, as well as related information that she/he
may already have, and that may be stored outside the database. Such

social database

user-

created content should be stored in the database; the user should be able to

query it (or query it together with the data, in what we call , see

Sect. 7.5.2) and (if the user allows) share it with other users so that user-user
communication (intra-user interaction) can be achieved.
l Building a social network of users. This can intuitively be based on the com-
monalities of their information needs. A measure of the connection of two users
can be established based simply on typical user interaction with the database
(queries and other commands); however, having user-created content enables
computing of more fine-grained links. The network obtained can be used in
several ways; we discuss some potential uses in Sect. 7.6 .

enriched queries

When both issues are handled, one obtains a system that can store user input and
use it to enable user-user communication. The overall system, as envisioned, is
depicted in Fig. 7.1 .
To develop such a system, the first issue should be tackled before the second one,
given that in order to build the social network, it is necessary to gather information
at the user level. Going beyond traditional information (database) commands
allows us to obtain a more faithful representation of user connections. Hence, in
this chapter we concentrate on the first issue. As stated in the Introduction, our
position is that relational databases

should

be used to store user-generated infor-
mation, since the database can greatly benefit from it. While relational databases are
very restricted and inflexible regarding the data that they can accept, they can be
made capable of storing user-generated information with some extensions to exist-
ing technology. Here, we propose one such extension, , that allows

existing relational databases to accept user input, store it, and organize it. Next, we
explain and define the concept and study the issues of private view creation,
storage, and maintenance.

private views

2 www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/
tgn/index.html