A semantic-based strategy to model multimedia social networks

The social facet of information has a deciding role in our quotidian life. An abstract representation and a proper management of Online Social Networks (OSNs) constitute a new challenge for communities of researchers. In addition, the need of extending OSNs to Multimedia Social Networks (MSNs)come from the fact that the vast majority of data is unstructured and heterogeneous, making the reuse and integration of information effortful. In this chapter we propose a general high-level model to represent and manage MSNs. Our approach is based on property graph represented by a hypergraph structure due to the intrinsic multidimensional nature of social networks and semantic relations to better represent the networks contents. Using the proposed graph structure is helpful to single out several levels of knowledge analysing the relationships defined between nodes of the same or different type. Moreover, the introduction of low-level multimodal features and a formalization of their semantic meanings give a more comprehensive view of the social network structure and content. Using this approach we call the represented network Multimedia Semantic Social Networks (MS2N ). The proposed data model could be useful for several applications and we propose a case study on cultural heritage domain