Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on System Sciences

How the Semantic Web is Being Used:An Analysis of FOAF Documents

Li Ding, Lina Zhou, Tim Finin, and Anupam Joshi

January 3, 2005

Semantic Web researchers have initially focused on the representation, development and use of ontologies but paid less attention to the social and structural relationships involved. The past year has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of published RDF documents using the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary, providing a valuable resource for investigating how early Semantic Web adopters use this technology as well as build social networks. We describe an approach to identify, discover, and analyze FOAF documents. Over 1.5 million of FOAF documents are collected to show the variety and scalability of the web of FOAF documents. We analyzed the empirical usage of namespace and properties in the FOAF community, which helps the FOAF project in standardizing vocabularies. We also analyzed the social networks induced by those FOAF documents and revealed interesting patterns which can become powerful resource for outsourcing and justification of scientific knowledge.

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Tags: foaf, semantic web, swoogle

Type: InProceedings

Note: Other GS keys: qKmMJC6ZYfkJ q8boJPOwBRUJ:

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