Social Networks and the Semantic Web offers valuable information to practitioners developing social-semantic software for the Web. It provides two major case studies. The first case study shows the possibilities of tracking a research community over the Web. It reveals how social network mining from the web plays an important role for obtaining large scale, dynamic network data beyond the possibilities of survey methods. The second case study highlights the role of the social context in user-generated classifications in content, such as the tagging systems known as folksonomies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2007, held in Innsbruck, Austria, in June 2007. Coverage includes semantic Web services, ontology learning, inference and mapping, social semantic Web, ontologies, personalization, foundations of the semantic Web, natural languages and ontologies, and querying and Web data models.

Collaborative working has been increasingly viewed as a good practice for organizations to achieve efficiency. Organizations that work well in collaboration may have access to new sources of funding, deliver new, improved, and more integrated services, make savings on shared costs, and exchange knowledge, information and expertise. Collaboration and the Semantic Web: Social Networks, Knowledge Networks and Knowledge Resources showcases cutting-edge research on the intersections of Semantic Web, collaborative work, and social media research, exploring how the resources of so-called social networking applications, which bring people together to interact and encourage sharing of personal information and ideas, can be tapped by Semantic Web techniques, making shared Web contents readable and processable for machine and intelligent applications, as well as humans. Semantic technologies have shown their potential for integrating valuable knowledge, and they are being applied to the composition of digital learning and working platforms. Integrated semantic applications, linked data, social networks, and networked digital solutions can now be used in collaborative environments and present participants with the context-aware information that they need.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2006, held in Beijing, China, in September 2006. The 36 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 full paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

Semantic web continues to be an increasingly important system for allowing end-users to share and communicate information online. Semantic Web: Ontology and Knowledge Base Enabled Tools, Services and Application focuses on the information systems discipline and the tools and techniques utilized for the emerging use of semantic web. Covering topics on semantic search, ontologies, and recommendation systems, this publication is essential for academics, practitioners, and industry professionals.

Analyzing and Securing Social Networks focuses on the two major technologies that have been developed for online social networks (OSNs): (i) data mining technologies for analyzing these networks and extracting useful information such as location, demographics, and sentiments of the participants of the network, and (ii) security and privacy technolo

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas. After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge. The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

This book contains a collection of thoroughly revised tutorial papers based on lectures given by leading researchers at the 4th International Summer School on the Reasoning Web, held in Venice, Italy, in September 2008. The objective of the book is to provide a coherent introduction to semantic web methods and research issues with a particular focus on reasoning. The seven tutorial papers presented provide competent coverage of methods and major application areas such as social networks, semantic multimedia indexing and retrieval, bioinformatics, and semantic web services. They highlight which techniques are already being successfully applied for purposes such as improving the performance of information retrieval algorithms, enabling the interoperation of heterogeneous agents, modelling users profiles and social relations, and standardizing and improving the accuracy of very large and dynamic scientific databases.

Online social networks have already become a bridge connecting our physical daily life with the (web-based) information space. This connection produces a huge volume of data, not only about the information itself, but also about user behavior. The ubiquity of the social Web and the wealth of social data offer us unprecedented opportunities for studying the interaction patterns among users so as to understand the dynamic mechanisms underlying different networks, something that was previously difficult to explore due to the lack of available data. In this book, we present the architecture of the research for social network mining, from a microscopic point of view. We focus on investigating several key issues in social networks. Specifically, we begin with analytics of social interactions between users. The first kinds of questions we try to answer are: What are the fundamental factors that form the different categories of social ties? How have reciprocal relationships been developed from parasocial relationships? How do connected users further form groups? Another theme addressed in this book is the study of social influence. Social influence occurs when one's opinions, emotions, or behaviors are affected by others, intentionally or unintentionally. Considerable research has been conducted to verify the existence of social influence in various networks. However, few literature studies address how to quantify the strength of influence between users from different aspects. In Chapter 4 and in [138], we have studied how to model and predict user behaviors. One fundamental problem is distinguishing the effects of different social factors such as social influence, homophily, and individual's characteristics. We introduce a probabilistic model to address this problem. Finally, we use an academic social network, ArnetMiner, as an example to demonstrate how we apply the introduced technologies for mining real social networks. In this system, we try to mine knowledge from both the informative (publication) network and the social (collaboration) network, and to understand the interaction mechanisms between the two networks. The system has been in operation since 2006 and has already attracted millions of users from more than 220 countries/regions.

As the Web continues to grow, increasing amounts of data are being made available for human and machine consumption. This emerging Semantic Web is rapidly entering the mainstream and, as a result, a variety of new solutions for searching, aggregating and the intelligent delivery of information are being produced,bothinresearchandcommercialsettings.Severalnewchallengesarise from this context, both from a technical and human–computer interaction p- spective – e.g., as issues to do with the scalability andusability of Semantic Web solutions become particularly important. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major inter- tional forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC brings together researchers, practitioners, and users from the areas of arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks,distributedcomputing,Webengineering,informationsystems,natural language processing, soft computing, and human–computer interaction to d- cuss the major challenges and proposed solutions, success stories and failures, as well the visions that can advance the ?eld.