Ontology Based Modelling and Visualisation of Social Networks for the Web

Abstract: Exploring and processing the relationships between social entitie (people and organizations) by mapping them to a mathematical graph model is been a rapidly growing research area known as Social Network Analysis (SNA). Majority of the models adapt statistical approaches to discover such social relationships in given resources. In this paper we introduce an initial work that takes a knowledge representation approach utilizing ontologies in order to map the social relationships between entities to logical models. This approach enables the deployment of inference mechanisms through the model by exploiting the logical structure to gain additional knowledge automatically from the resources at hand. Additionally, we use this structure and the information gained to visualize the social network that enables information seekers to have an explicit view of the entities and the relationships between them. As a demonstration this model and its visualization, we utilize the ontological model to explicate and visualize the relationships between the terror organization Al Qaeda and the people, who are connected to it, and events associated with it.JRC.G.2-Support to external securit