Social Networks and the Semantic Web

A formal, web-based representation of social networks is both a necessity in terms of infrastructure as well as a prominent application for the Semantic Web. In this paper we present three advances in exploiting the opportunity of semantically-enriched network data: (1) an ontology for the representation of social networks and relationships (2) a hybrid system for online data acquisition that combines traditional web mining techniques with the collection of Semantic Web data (2) a case study highlighting some of the possible analysis of this data using methods from Social Network Analysis, the branch of sociology concerned with relational data.