Content
The module starts with an introduction to the fundamentals of digital communities and an overview of historical and contemporary online social networks (OSN) and the technological challenges and problems they face. The second part of the module discusses architectures, standards, and protocols of the social web with a clear focus on decentralized and distributed online social networks. This includes architectural concepts for federated, peer-topeer, and blockchain-based online social network architectures as well as the standards and protocols implemented for inter-platform communication and collaboration. For example, architectures and protocols of various peer-topeer systems and Blockchains are analyzed and discussed. The third part of the module focuses on decentralized identity management (IDM), discussing various aspects of IDM and existing established and novel services, such as the Domain Name Service (DNS), the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), or Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI).
Finally, the module gives an introduction to graph theory, followed by methods and applications of social network analysis. The module aims to present a holistic view of the different parts, discussing historic, current state-of-the-art, and novel standards and systems. If applicable, scientific literature (papers) and live coding examples are used during the lecture. Students who have successfully finished this module have an overview of current and future concepts of digital communities, specifically of the architectural aspects they are based on. They have acquired a deep understanding of both low and high level aspects of decentralized OSN services and are able to apply the various concepts for creating novel OSN platforms.
