A Uniform Semantic Web Framework for Co-authorship Networks

Modeling co-authorship networks merely in FOAF, as is common with social networks, suffers the inability to capture semantics which are specific to collaboration schemes in the scientific community. For instance, the weight of the co-author relation which expresses the magnitude of that relation between two co-authors is subject to change dynamically as new publications are assigned to the co-authorship graph. They require mechanisms like rules in Semantic Web to calculate them. We introduce here a framework of (1) extending the FOAF ontology, and (2) implementing SWRL rules to construct weighted co-authorship networks which will contain metrics like exclusivity, frequency, or weight, as suggested in the literature. It makes it easy for the extended FOAF to integrate it with the native SWRL rules, and provide thus a uniform framework based solely on the Semantic Web for the representation and analysis of weighted co-authorship networks. An evaluation of our framework run on real data is provided.