Ontology based modeling and visualization of social networks for the web

Abstract

Exploring and processing the relationships between social entities by mapping them to mathematical graph models has been a rapidly growing research area known as Social Network Analysis (SNA). The majority of models adapt statistical approaches such as data mining to discover social relationships in given resources. This paper introduces an initial work that takes a knowledge representation approach utilizing ontologies in order to map the relationships between social entities to logical models. This approach enables the application of inference mechanisms by exploiting the logical structure of the model. As a result, we gain automatically additional knowledge from the resources at hand. This is realized in our work distinguishing it from other related research, which is based on statistical or knowledge representation approaches that we have been aware of. Additionally, we use this structure and the automatically gained information to visualize the social network. This enables information seekers to have an explicit view of the entities and the relationships beetween them. The interactive visualization acts as an exploration tool which allows users to find pertinent information. As a demonstration, we use the ontological model to discover and to visualize the relationships between the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, the people an the events associated with it.