Ontology Generation from Social Networks

Analysis of social network data is gaining popularity with the increased availability of real-world data including data publicly available over the Internet such as publications and data resulting from interactions via social networking platforms and e-communication tools. In this chapter we present an approach to constructing light-weight ontologies from social network data. In relation to the more traditional (semi-)automatic ontology learning techniques we reuse the approach typically used in learning ontologies from text (see Grobelnik and Mladenić(2006) for details) where the candidate instances and classes for the ontology are lexical items described by a set of attributes. We replace lexical items with nodes in the social network and attributes by descriptions of the node context in the graph. Similar techniques can then be applied for ontology learning either from text or from social networks. To prove our claims …