Social Network Analysis Application in Bulletin Board Systems

A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals where we can observe their social activities. Conception of centrality comes from structural sociology. It is a fundamental method in the social network analysis. Centrality is a fundamental concept in network analysis. It usually is used to identify the "most important" ones in a social network. Bulletin board system is an important way for human communication. It is important to appoint appropriate moderator for each board in the bulletin board system. It'll influence the running efficiency of the BBS from several aspects. This paper introduces centrality measures into the appointment of moderator for bulletin board systems. To fulfill above aim, a social network named BBS network is built for each board in a bulletin board system. Each node denotes a user for the bulletin board system. Several methods are used to compute centrality value of each node in the BBS network. The nodes with highest centrality may be the right users to play the moderator roles. The computing results can also be used to judge if current moderators work well.