The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the...

The past ten years have seen a rapid growth in the numbers of people signing up to use Web-based social networks (hundreds of millions of new members are now joining the main services each year) with a large amount of content being shared on these networks (tens of billions of content items are shared each month). With this growth in usage and data being generated, there are many opportunities to discover the knowledge that is often inherent but somewhat hidden in these networks. Web mining techniques are being used to derive this hidden knowledge. In addition, the Semantic Web, including the...