Extracting a Social Network among Entities by Web mining

Social networks play an important role in the Semantic Web. Several methods exist to extract social networks among people such as FOAF aggregation, email analysis, and Web mining. In this paper, we expand the existing techniques for social network mining from the Web and apply them to obtain a social network for different entities. Especially, two types of networks are investigated in this study: firms and artists. Two technical improvements are made: relation identification and threshold tuning. Several evaluations emphasize the effectiveness of these methods. A social network of artists of the International Triennale of Contemporary Art (Yokohama Triennale 2005) was portrayed on the web site to facilitate navigation of the sources of artists’ information. Our approach contributes to existing Semantic Web studies by cultivating the applicability of social networks from various domains.