The paper “Social Machines: A Unified Paradigm to Describe Social Web-Oriented Systems“ authored by Vanilson Burégio, Silvio Meira e Nelson Rosa has been accepted for publication at The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (SOCM2013) co-located with 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013). The conference will be held in May 13th-17th, 2013 at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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.