A First Approach to Belief Dynamics in Complex Social Networks

FABIO R. GALLO; GERARDO I. SIMARI; M. VANINA MARTÍNEZ; NATALIA ABAD SANTOS; MARCELO A. FALAPPA

Montevideo

Workshop; 11th Alberto Mendelzon International Workshop on Foundations of Data Management and the Web; 2017

Many people today participate in more than one social network on a daily basis; such networks can be seen as dynamic environments containing knowledge about their members. From a KR perspective, these environments are complex in many dimensions; for instance, it is not clear how to treat news being communicated through the network, especially when it contradicts a user´s own knowledge, or when contradicting news is received from different sources. We are interested in reasoning about the discussion of beliefs in social media. Given the variety of platforms, the underlying communication structure can be seen as a complex network|the potential to integrate many different data sources is enormous. The complex network is represented by a graph, and users have access to a stream of news items that are produced by others. Local revisions are performed first, where each user responds to news items that show up in their feeds; since each local revision is carried out in parallel, the result of this stage could violate global integrity constraints. A global revision process is then carried out in order to return to a consistent state. In this paper we focus solely on local revisions.