Flink: Semantic Web technology for the extraction and analysis of social networks

We present the Flink system for the extraction, aggregation and visualization of online social networks. Flink employs semantic technology for reasoning with personal information extracted from a number of electronic information sources including web pages, emails, publication archives and FOAF profiles. The acquired knowledge is used for the purposes of social network analysis and for generating a web-based presentation of the community. We demonstrate our novel method to social science based on electronic data using the example of the Semantic Web research community.