Someone kindly gave me a copy of Social Networks and the Semantic Web the Ph.D. thesis of Péter Mika at the Free University of Amsterdam. The thesis contains precisely what the title suggests: the application of Semantic Web technology to Social Network Analysis. I guess, the most visible application of Péter's research is Flink which takes co-authored papers as the main source of the social network.
Chapter 3 contains an excellent overview of SNA in general, covering several issues I have thought about (what is a network, what are the boundaries and so forth).
Page 58 is the best page in the thesis. It contains Figure 4.1, an illustration of the structure of a weblog (links, quotes, comments and such). Although the illustration, a screenshot, is anonymous I recognised it immediately. It is the Thinking and berries in Umea post of Lilia. Further down the page it gets even better:
The early work of Efimova and Anjewierden also stands out in that they were among the first to study blogs from a communication perspective. [Understanding weblog communities through digital traces: a framework, a tool and an example, International Workshop on Community Informatics (COMINF 2006), Montpellier, France.]
A nice social touch in a nice thesis.
As the author of thesis, I would like to thank you for your review!
I'm also happy to add the thesis will be available as book published by Springer in July, 2007.
Social Networks and the Semantic Web
Best,
Peter
Posted by: Peter Mika | August 16, 2007 at 03:09 PM