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Abstract |
Epidemic spreading simulation in social networks denotes a set of techniques that allow to assess the temporal evolution and the consequences of a pandemic. They were largely used by governments and International health organizations during the COVID-19 world crisis to decide the appropriate countermeasures to limit the diffusion of the disease. Among them, the existing simulation techniques based on a network model aimed at studying the infectious disease dynamics have a prominent role and are widely adopted. However, even if they leverage the topological structure of a social network, they disregard the intrinsic and individual features of its members. A semantic social network is defined as a structure consisting of interlinking layers, which include a social network layer, to represent people and their relationships and a concept network layer, to represent concepts, their ontological relationships and implicit similarities. Here, we propose a novel epidemic simulation framework that allows to describe a community of people as a semantic social network, to adopt the most commonly used compartmental models for describing epidemic spreading, such as Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) or Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR), and to enable semantic reasoning to increase the accuracy of the simulation. Finally, we show how to use the framework to simulate the impact of a pandemic in a community where the job of each member is known in advance. |
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