Network Modeling and

Aggregation
Rahul Roy
E-mail: rahulroy@nist.edu
 Need for semantic based
representations
• Aggregation of social network information
– Especially in heterogeneous environment.

• Facilitate reuse and exchange of data.

– Facilitate unified representation and secondary
analysis
 Email
server

Source Source john@gmail.co

amit@gmail.co A
m B m

If X sends mail to Y then X

rules knows Y
 Ontology Representation of Social
Individuals: FOAF
• The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of
machine-readable pages describing people, the links
between them and the things they create and do; it is a
contribution to the linked information system known as the
Web.
• FOAF defines an open, decentralized technology for
connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.
• FOAF is part of a shift towards a Web where we can choose
the sites and tools we like, without being cut off from
friends who made different choices.
• FOAF lets you share and inter-connect information from
diverse sources, move it around, and use it in unexpected
new ways.

Sharif University of Technology,

Semantic Web Course, Fall 2005
 FOAF: Friend of a friend
“The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-
readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they
create and do. ” (http://www.foaf-project.org/)

• Annotation vocabulary for linking semantic information about people to

achieve a social network

• Everybody can provide/link his/her own FoaF file on his/her own

webpage.

• Related to the success of “social networks”: friendster, orkut, ryze,

LinkedIn etc.
But: these use disclosed applications/databases/portals instead whereas
Foaf is intended to work decentralized and based on RDF.

Reference: FOAF Vocabulary Specification 0.91:

http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

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 FOAF Vocabulary:

See details at
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/

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 Basic example
<foaf:Person rdf:about="#me" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
<foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>241021fb0e6289f92815fc210f9e9137262c252e</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/" />
<foaf:img rdf:resource="/images/me.jpg" />
</foaf:Person>

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 FOAF: Basic Idea
• To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This
is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and
imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them.
For example, a document might describe a person. The title document
to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a
person. Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing
documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and
allowing links to be created with relationship values. Only when we
have this extra level of semantics will we be able to use computer
power to help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our
own reading.
- Tim Berners-Lee "W3 future directions" keynote, 1st World Wide
Web Conference Geneva, May 1994

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 FOAF: Basic Idea
• FOAF aims to create a linked information system about
people, groups, companies and other kinds of thing.
• If people publish information in FOAF document format,
machines will be able to make use of that information.
• If those files contain “see also” references to other such
documents in the Web, we will have a machine-friendly
version of today’s hypertext web
• FOAF documents are usually represented in RDF.

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 FOAF basic concepts
• foaf:Agent
– An agent (eg., person, group, software or physical artifact)
– Subclass: foaf:Person, foaf:Organization, foaf:Group
• foaf:Document
– Sublcass: foaf:Image
• foaf:Person
– A person
• foaf:Project
– A project

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 FOAF basic properties
• foaf:family_name
• foaf:firstName
• foaf:homepage
• foaf:knows
– A person known by this person
• foaf:mbox
• foaf:mbox_sha1sum
• foaf:title
– Personal title (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr, etc.)

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 Create your own FOAF
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
• http://www.l xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/">
dodds.com/f <foaf:Person rdf:ID="me">
<foaf:name>Ying Ding</foaf:name>
oaf/foaf-a- <foaf:title>Mrs.</foaf:title>
matic <foaf:givenname>Ying</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>Ding</foaf:family_name>
• Fill in the <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>f782acba4fc1c1bbecefc41fe2696fa62a84dfe5</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="www.yingding.com"/>
<foaf:depiction rdf:resource="me.jpg"/>
detail of <foaf:phone rdf:resource="tel:0043-512-5076488"/>
yourself <foaf:workplaceHomepage rdf:resource="www.iu.edu"/>
<foaf:workInfoHomepage rdf:resource="www.iu.edu/ying"/>
• It will create <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="www.uibk.ac.at"/>
<foaf:knows>
FOAF in <foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Stefan Decker</foaf:name>
RDF <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>1bc1f862b688a45b7e0c8d4a8467c23177c53fad</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="www.semanticweb.org"/></foaf:Person></foaf:knows>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Ioan Toma</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>1e9f327c5c745341ad13710805961aa739861904</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="www.ubik.ac.at/Ioan"/></foaf:Person></foaf:knows></foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>
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 FOAF Example in RDF/XML
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>John Breslin</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:John.Breslin@deri.org"/>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Stefan Decker</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:stefan.decker@deri.org"/>
</foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>
</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

foaf:Person foaf:Person

rdf:type rdf:type

foaf:knows

foaf:mbox
foaf:mbox
foaf:name foaf:name

John Breslin mailto:John.Breslin@deri.org Stefan Decker mailto:Stefan.Decker@deri.org

30.10.2019 13
 FOAF Conclusions
• Vocabulary for machine-processable personal homepages
• currently some preliminary tools available
• not yet as successful as social networks such as friendster,
which use proprietary central data
• advantage of foaf: decentralized, could serve as exchange
format between those existing networks and exists on its
own

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Social Relationship and Ontology
Key idea in representation of social relationship:

“Representation of social relationships

needs to be fine grained enough so that
it can capture all details from individual
sources of information in a way that
these can be later recombined and taken
as evidence of a certain relationship”
 Characteristics of Social
Relationship
• Valency
• Strength
• Provenance
• Relationship history
• Relationship roles
•
 Concept Models
• Social relations could be represented as n-ary
predicates
– Reification is used to deal with n-ary relations.
• Relationships class is related to a general
Parameter class by the hasParameter
relationship
 RDF Representation

Parameters are related by the valued-by meta-property to

their range
 Alternative Method

The generic parameter class is defined as a subclass of

rdf:property
 Limitation
• Reification based representation does not
capture social relationships with an arity
higher than two.
• Reification does not take into account the
context dependence of social relation.
• Separation between an observable and its
interpretation as social relation is not taken
into account.
 Description and Situation Ontology
• Generic pattern for modelling non-physical
objects whose intended meaning results from
statements.
– Emerges in combination with other entities.
– E.g. social role is usually represented as statement
and not concept.
D & S ontology Design pattern
Instantiation of D&S for Social
relation
 Aggregation
• Convert the electronic data sets in traditional
formats (RDBMS, excel, XML files etc.) into
an RDF-based syntax, which allows,
• Store the data in an ontology store and
Manipulate it with ontology-based tools.
• In this process is necessary,
– Assign identifiers to resources and represent the data
in terms of a shared ontology such as FOAF.
– Use a ontology mapping
 Aggregation
• To find identical resources across the datasets.
This is a two step process:
– It requires capturing the domain-specific
knowledge of when to consider two instances to be
the same
– To carry out the actual instance unification or
smushing, as a reasoning task, where we iteratively
execute the rules or procedures that determine
equality until no more equivalent instances can be
found.
Representing Identity