The Structure of Social Documents

Abstract

Enterprise collaboration platforms are large scale, highly integrated information infrastructures that enable many hundreds of employees to work collaboratively and share information. In this paper, we lay the theoretical and analytical foundations for the use of social documents as digital traces of collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration platforms. Through a review of related research and an empirical analysis of social documents, we identify key concepts and structures, providing the foundation for the Social Document Ontology (SocDOnt). SocDOnt expresses the generic structure of social documents and extends previous work in two important ways. At the micro-level a social document is defined as a composition of an intellectual entity enhanced by both intellectual and simple components and at the macro-level a collection is defined as an aggregation of social documents. These analytical constructs enable a more nuanced and granular analysis of social documents to understand collaborative activity in enterprise collaboration platforms.