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

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https://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/184/How-the-Semantic-Web-is-Being-Used-An-Analysis-of-FOAF-Documents

Permanent Link

http://hdl.handle.net/11603/12220

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UMBC Information Systems Department
UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department
UMBC Faculty Collection

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Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2005-01-03

Type of Work

conference papers and proceedings preprints
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This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.

Subjects

the friend of a friend (FOAF)
semantic web
swoogle
UMBC Ebiquity Research Group

Abstract

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.