Social Network Analysis meets the Semantic Web: What FOAF Reveals About LiveJournal

October 14, 2004
John C. Paolillo and Elijah Wright | Indiana University

The Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) project was begun in 1999 to explore the application of semantic web technologies (RDF/XML) to people’s personal details, such as their interests, occupations and personal affiliations, with the aim of facilitating social network data-mining. We develop here an approach to visualizing FOAF data that employs techniques of quantitative Social Network Analysis, using the foaf:knows and foaf:interest relations extracted from a crawl of FOAF files. These relations are analyzed statistically to identify a set of natural social groups described by the data. The results reveal that large weblog hosting sites like LiveJournal are concentrating users’ social capital at a heretofore unrecognized scale. This finding casts the recent surge in popularity of social networking software in a new and somewhat disturbing light. A related paper is available at http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/foaf-galway/papers/fp/challenges_of_foaf_characterization/.

Speaker Details

John Paolillo is Associate Professor of Information Science and Informatics, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University. His research spans linguistic variation, social network analysis, computer-mediated communication, and natural language processing. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~paolillo/

Elijah Wright is a third-year PhD student at the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science. He holds an MA in English (Rhetoric and Composition) from Ohio University and a BA in English from Tennessee Technological University. His research interests include information diffusion, social network analysis, weblogs, large-scale network visualizations, and the semantic web.