Growing World Wide Social Network by Bridging Social Portals Using FOAF

Portals providing the modeling of social relations among people became more and more popular. Although the existing FOAF (Friend of the Friend) ontology developed for modeling such social relations was introduced and enjoyed popularity, it is not used in such extent that it can be considered as World Wide Social Network. Such network can bring benefits (e.g., by providing useful analysis) only if it is sufficiently large. One problem is that no bridge exists between the social portals (often enjoying commercial popularity) and the FOAF backed by the Semantic Web projects. Our aim is to find ways to stimulate existing social networks grow to the World Wide Social Network. We propose a method for bridging the different social portals that is based on employing web page wrappers for generation the output in Semantic Web format (RDF), namely the FOAF and in such a way enable the World Wide Social Network. We believe that the FOAF might become a good basis for standard for giving the possibility to interconnect users on different portals representing the same real person. Merging of social portals might bring the users counting now millions to the Semantic Web applications.