Social Network Analysis on the Semantic Web: Techniques and Challenges for Visualizing FOAF

The Semantic Web promises to provide new applications for Internet users through the use of RDF metadata attached to various information resources on the web. Yet is somewhat unclear who will provide the metadata, or what will motivate people to provide it, let alone the exact nature of the applications the Semantic Web will ultimately support. What will the “killer app” of the Semantic Web be, and what shape will it take? An answer to this question may have already arisen, in the form of the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) vocabulary. The FOAF project was begun in 1999 to explore the application of Semantic Web technologies (RDF/XML) to describing people’s personal details: their professional and personal lives, their friends, interests and other social dispositions. Its main product is the FOAF vocabulary, an RDF/XML namespace with elements defined for describing an individual’s social sphere (Brickley and Miller, 2003).