Social Networks and Semantics

This chapter discusses the relation between Social Networks and Semantics – two areas that have recently gathered a lot of attention from both academia and industry. We show how synergies between these two areas can be used to solve concrete problems, and we describe three approaches that demonstrate the potential for interconnecting these technologies. The first approach focuses on the semantic profiling of social networks. More precisely, we study the characteristics of large online social networks through an extensive analysis of over 1.9 million MySpace profiles in an effort to understand who is using these networks and how they are being used. We study MySpace through a comparative study over three distinct but related facets: the sociability of users in MySpace; the demographic characteristics of MySpace users; and the text artifacts of MySpace users. The second approach to interconnecting social networks and semantics focuses on a solution for mediating between social tagging systems. The Upper Tag Ontology (UTO) is proposed to integrate social tagging data by mediating between related social metadata schemes. We discuss how UTO data can be linked with other social metadata (e.g., FOAF, DC, SIOC, SKOS), how to crawl and cluster tag data from major social tagging systems, and how to integrate data using UTO. The third approach discusses the use of social semantics to qualitatively improve the task of service ranking. We explore the idea of using social annotation technologies for ranking web services; and we show how such an approach can be implemented using information provided by Delicious, one of the largest social networks.