Extracting Ego-Centric Social Networks from Linked Open Data

Linked Open Data (LOD) refers to freely available data on the WWW that are typically represented using Resource Description Framework (RDF). LOD is an invaluable source of rich and structured information, and enables a wide range of new applications, such as Social Network Analysis (SNA). In this paper, we address the extraction of social networks from LOD using SPARQL language, and we present various patterns to extract ego-centric networks. We also present two case studies: i) influence networks of intellectuals, and ii) co-acting networks, to demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of the approach.