A Semantic Model for Academic Social Network Analysis

The social network is a theoretical construct useful in the social sciences to study relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, or even entire societies. To deal with social networks, various approaches have been proposed to analyze them. What has not been done is to properly and effectively represent, manage and use various social networks. In this paper, we propose a semantic model that can naturally represent various academic social networks, especially various complex semantic relationships among social actors. This model can be used as the foundation for managing, manipulating and querying academic social networks. We also introduce a concise language to represent and query academic social networks.