Artifact-Centric Semantic Social-Collaboration Network in an Online Healthcare Context

The emergence of Web 2.0 technology and associated social networking system, brings many possibilities and features for online collaboration. Several reference models, frameworks, tools and infrastructures have been proposed to support seamless interaction and communication between human entities in an online social environment. A few studies indicated that social networks are not only constructed on social connections of people, but also mediated by shared objects, known as object-centred sociality. However, most of the developed social software system was centred around the concept of maintaining human-centric social relationships only. This may be because of the common issues of exploiting social network approach for online collaboration related to maintaining the social behaviour, interaction and communication between human and artifacts themselves. These resources or artifacts (i.e., physical objects, software entities, documents, etc.) are active elements in a way that they may coordinate, cooperate, and even trigger collaborative work in a social environment, which is difficult understand and implement. Thus, it is essential to concentrate on exploring the artifact-centric social relations in a new generation of social-collaboration network. This paper explores the concept and characteristics of the social software system and emphasise the importance and role of objects and artifact-centric sociality in a social-collaboration network. We also outline the benefits of semantic representation of social-collaborative network structure by extending existing social ontologies such as FOAF, SIOC, and DC that define additional concepts, properties and complex social relationship of humans, social objects and collaboration artifacts. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach by applying it to a large-scale social-collaborative healthcare service called GRaCE-AGE within the United Kingdom.