Semantic Social Network Analysis

Abstract

Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been widely studied since the middle of the 20th century. Research in this field tries to understand and exploit the key features of social networks in order to manage their life cycle and predict their evolutions. Detecting strategic positions, roles and communities are among its main concerns. The increasingly popular web 2.0 sites form the largest social network. Some researchers apply classical methods from social network analysis (SNA) to such online networks; others provide models to leverage the semantics of their representation. In this paper, we propose to leverage semantic web technologies to merge and exploit the best features of each of these approaches. Furthermore, we show how to facilitate and enhance the analysis of online social networks, exploiting the power of semantic social network analysis.