Taxonomies of Relationships in Multidimensional Social Networks Relevant for Supporting Real-Time Video Communication Systems

As information technology has advanced, the usage of online social networks rapidly increased at the same time, and social interaction shifted onto these platforms. Online social networks have gained significant popularity and are now among the most popular sites on the Web. Likewise, sophisticated video communication systems, which in the past mainly concentrated on the business videoconferencing market, are shifting into the private domain. In the realm of these developments, we are aiming for integration of online social networks with intelligent video communication systems. Relevant information extracted from massive amounts of online social network data could inform intelligent behaviour within video communication systems, and therefore needs to be extracted. This article presents a selection of taxonomies of relationships as basis for multidimensional social networks that we consider relevant for such purposes. As users might not necessarily be very active, this selection also considers how well it could work with sparse network layers. Based on a literature study, we conclude that the combination of layers with sparse information onto a multidimensional network usually increases the usefulness of the data for its analysis.