A Social Network Ontology for Semantic Web Enabled Collaboration

Social networks have first been studied by social scientists to understand the patterns of relationships between people. More recently, social networking on the Internet capitalizes on the Web’s latent structure as a meta-network of social connections to boost computer-supported collaboration in conjunction with the use of Semantic Web metadata. Such metadata are generally machine-created and per se lack certification or trust grading. This paper examines how social network information can be used to accelerate reliable metadata creation. In particular, we focus on the application of Web annotations to leverage asynchronous collaboration through the Semantic Web by introducing the notion of a user’s Web personality to model the various trust levels in collaboration.