Social Network Analysis of Ontology Edit Logs

This paper presents an approach and experiments applying social network analysis on collaborative edit log data. Semantic Web Wiki and FAO ontologies are given as case studies. A number of users that are editing the same ontology or the same pages can be viewed as a social network of people interacting via the ontology. We propose to represent the edit log files as a graph either of users that are connected if they are editing the same ontology concepts or of concepts that are connected if edited by the same users. We apply social network analysis on such graphs in order to provide some insights into activity of the wiki/ontology editors. Finally, a plugin was developed which provides a comfortable GUI to some of the used analysis techniques, so that the people interested in monitoring the editing activity can perform that analysis and visualization on their own.