Visualizing Social Networks by Harnessing: SIOC and FOAF documents, RDF tools - and producing SVG diagrams

Fred Glasson wrote a very interesting blog entry entitled Implementing and visualizing relationships between Talk Digger's SIOC and FOAF documents.

Researchers are frequently publishing papers about analyzing social networks using semantic web technology now.

The reasons for that are pretty obvious:

1. There are networks of bad people doing bad things in the world, including the US, right now - so social networks are topical.
2. Social networks are already documented in semantic web syntax whenever FOAF documents are involved.
3. Page scraping software can get information published on the Web as HTML text into semantic web compatible XML very quickly.
4. Semantic web analysis tools are already very powerful and widely available for free.
5. SVG is widely supported (including by Firefox 1.5) and, being another XML file format - it is easy to convert semantic web data (RDF and OWL based XML data) into SVG using tools like IsaViz.

So in other words, analyzing social networks provides low-hanging fruit for semantic web researchers and commercial companies and other organizations.

The toolchain (define: toolchain) he describes in his post is simple, completely based on free software, and generally useful to a lot of information analysis projects involving data-mining, information analysis, and graphical visualization of the results.

tags technorati : sioc foaf ontologies semanticweb socialweb social visualizing visualization isaviz rdf xml svg diagramming