Social computing: From social informatics to social intelligence

The theoretical, methodological, and technological aspects of social computing and its various application areas are discussed. Social computing represents a new paradigm of computing and technology development and has become an important part of information and communication technology (ICT) fields. It is an interdisciplinary research and application field and its scope is expanding to both theoretical and technological perspectives. Social computing applications are driven by the needs to develop better social software to facilitate interaction and communication among groups of people, computerize aspects of human society, and forecast the effects of changing technologies and policies on social and cultural behavior. Social computing and online communities are rapidly changing and affecting the global economy, social interaction, and every aspect of a society. The move from social informatics to social intelligence can be achieved by modeling and analyzing social behavior, by capturing human society dynamics, and generating and managing actionable social knowledge.