sw_and_social_networks


 * Semantic web and social networks research**

Social networking sites (e.g. Friendster, []) have, since around 2003, become popular places for people to meet online. Peter Mika explains tha social networking sites require users to create their profile within a central system. From Mika's point of view, this is problematic because it does not allow user profiles to be "exported in machine processable formats," (2004b, intro. sect). One solution to this might be FOAF profiles, already in common use in some blogging applications?

As Mika explains FOAF profiles are created by the individual user and stored in a distributed fashion (tyically posted on the personal web page of the user). Much like web pages, these profiles also link to the profiles of friends, creating the so-called FOAF-web. In effect, the FOAF-web is a single social network described in a universal format that is directly accessible to machines,.

Research by Peter Mika's and others on Semantic Web and social networks aims to use the FOAF ontology to create ways of formaly representing web-based social networks. Peter Mika points to the emergence of social networking sites (circa 2003) as popular online places. For example, he reports that Friendster ([]) attracted "over 5 million registered users in the span of a few months," (2004b, intro. sect).

Mika explains that social networking sites "allow users to post a profile with basic information, to invite their friends and to link to their profiles in the system. The system also lets the users visualize and browse the resulting network in order to discover friends in common, friends thought to be lost or potential new friendships based on shared interests," (2004b, intro. sect).

To Mika however social networking sites like Friendster are centralized systems, and thus have a number of problems. Firstly, user profiles are stored cantrally and "cannot be exported in machine processable formats," and secondly "centralized sites did not allow users to control the information they provide on their own terms," (2004b, intro. sect).

Mika points to the "The Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) ontology [as] a first attempt at a formal, machine processable representation of user profiles and friendship networks," (Mika, 2004b, intro. sect' c.f. Brickley & Miller, 2003). > Social Networks and the Semantic Web. This inter-disciplinary research project is a collaboration within VUBIS (the VU Research School for Business Information Sciences) with the group of prof. dr. Tom Elfring at the Faculty of Social Sciences. The project on one side investigates how the methods of Social Network Analysis (SNA) contribute to the analysis of online communities, with a case study about the Semantic Web research community itself. On the other side, the project looks at how the Semantic Web could benefit from methods of SNA in improving the social aspects of the Semantic Web architecture. (From [], retrieved September 19, 2006)


 * Internal links**
 * foaf
 * peter_mika


 * External links**
 * []

e.g.
 * References**

Brickley, D. & Miller, L. 2003. //FOAF Vocabulary Specification//. Technical report, RDFWeb FOAF Project, 2003.

Mika, P. (2004b). //Social networks and the semantic web//. Paper presented at the 2004 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2004).