Social Measures and Flexible Navigation on Online Contact Networks

This paper discusses ways of navigating online contact networks -networks of social connections defined under a relational context -on a way that can provide more meaningful information to those that use them. We use the concept of social distance to address the different levels of social information and express the subjective vagueness in social ties by means of fuzzy numbers. The implementation of an algorithm for measuring prestige based on such vague estimations is reported. For the sake of illustration, a numerical example using a fuzzy graph is provided in which the strength or weakness of the connections is defined as a fuzzy number.