Social Network Analysis meets the Semantic Web: What FOAF Reveals About LiveJournal

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 5:10

The Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) project was begun in 1999 to explore the application of semantic web technologies (RDF/XML) to people's personal details, such as their interests, occupations and personal affiliations, with the aim of facilitating social network data-mining.  We develop here an approach to visualizing FOAF data that employs techniques of quantitative Social Network Analysis, using the foaf:knows and foaf:interest relations extracted from a crawl of FOAF files. These relations are analyzed statistically to identify a set of natural social groups described by the data. The results reveal that large weblog hosting sites like LiveJournal are concentrating users' social capital at a heretofore unrecognized scale. This finding casts the recent surge in popularity of social networking software in a new and somewhat disturbing light. A related paper is available at w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/f...