Ontology-Based Approach for Temporal Semantic Modelling of Social Networks

Social networks have recently gained a growing interest on the web. Traditional formalisms for representing social networks are static and suffer from the lack of semantics. In this paper, we explore the use of semantic web technologies to support the representation of dynamic social networks. Therefore, we develop the SemTemp ontology which aligns and extends existing ontologies, such as FOAF, SIOC, SKOS and OWL-Time to provide a temporal and semantically rich description of social data. We also present some modeling examples to illustrate how our ontology can be used to effectively model dynamic social network data.