Modeling User-Content Interaction in Multimedia Social Networks Using Hypergraphs

In this paper, we propose a novel data model for Multimedia Social Networks, i.e. particular social media networks that combine information on users belonging to one or more social communities together with the multimedia content that is generated and used within the related environments. The proposed model relies on the hypergraph data structure to capture and represent in a simple way all the different kinds of relationships that are typical of social media networks, and in particular among multimedia contents, users and multimedia content and users themselves. We also introduce some user and multimedia ranking functions to enable different applications. Finally, some experiments concerning effectiveness of the approach for supporting multimedia information retrieval activities are reported and discussed.