The paper “Social Machines: A Unified Paradigm to Describe Social Web-Oriented Systems” authored by Vanilson Burégio, Silvio Meira and Nelson Rosa, has been accepted for publication in “The Theory and Practice of Social Machines” (SOCM2013), the First International Workshop focused on Social Machines at the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013). This is one of the results of the research work by Vanilson Buregio and part of our position about Social Machines. WWW 2013 will feature Nigel Shadbolt (organizer of the SOCM2013 and director of the Web Science Trust, and the Web Foundation - organisations that have a common commitment to advance our understanding of the Web), Luis von Ahn (of CAPTCHA) and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

A brief overview of the paper is given next

Blending computational and social elements into software has gained significant attention in key conferences and journals. In this context, “Social Machines” appears as a promising model for unifying both computational and social processes. However, it is a fresh topic, with concepts and definitions coming from different research fields, making a unified understanding of the concept a somewhat challenging endeavor. This paper aims to investigate efforts related to this topic and build a preliminary classification scheme to structure the science of Social Machines. We provide a preliminary overview of this research area through the identification of the main visions, concepts, and approaches; we additionally examine the result of the convergence of existing contributions. With the field still in its early stage, we believe that this work can collaborate to the process of providing a more common and coherent conceptual basis for understanding Social Machines as a paradigm. Furthermore, this study helps detect important research issues and gaps in the area.

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