A Dynamic Management Method for FOAF Using RSS and OLAP cube

Abstract

Since the introduction of web 2.0 technology, social network service has been recognized as the foundation of an important future information technology. The advent of web 2.0 has led to the change of content creators. In the existing web, content creators are service providers, whereas they have changed into service users in the recent web. Users share experiences with other users improving contents quality, thereby it has increased the importance of social network. As a result, diverse forms of social network service have been emerged from relations and experiences of users. Social network is a network to construct and express social relations among people who share interests and activities. Today's social network service has not merely confined itself to showing user interactions, but it has also developed into a level in which content generation and evaluation are interacting with each other. As the volume of contents generated from social network service and the number of connections between users have drastically increased, the social network extraction method becomes more complicated. Consequently the following problems for the social network extraction arise. First problem lies in insufficiency of representational power of object in the social network. Second problem is incapability of expressional power in the diverse connections among users. Third problem is the difficulty of creating dynamic change in the social network due to change in user interests. And lastly, lack of method capable of integrating and processing data efficiently in the heterogeneous distributed computing environment. The first and last problems can be solved by using FOAF, a tool for describing ontology-based user profiles for construction of social network. However, solving second and third problems require a novel technology to reflect dynamic change of user interests and relations. In this paper, we propose a novel method to overcome the above problems of existing social network extraction method by applying FOAF (a tool for describing user profiles) and RSS (a literary web work publishing mechanism) to OLAP system in order to dynamically innovate and manage FOAF. We employed data interoperability which is an important characteristic of FOAF in this paper. Next we used RSS to reflect such changes as time flow and user interests. RSS, a tool for literary web work, provides standard vocabulary for distribution at web sites and contents in the form of RDF/XML. In this paper, we collect personal information and relations of users by utilizing FOAF. We also collect user contents by utilizing RSS. Finally, collected data is inserted into the database by star schema. The system we proposed in this paper generates OLAP cube using data in the database. 'Dynamic FOAF Management Algorithm' processes generated OLAP cube. Dynamic FOAF Management Algorithm consists of two functions: one is find_id_interest() and the other is find_relation (). Find_id_interest() is used to extract user interests during the input period, and find-relation() extracts users matching user interests. Finally, the proposed system reconstructs FOAF by reflecting extracted relationships and interests of users. For the justification of the suggested idea, we showed the implemented result together with its analysis. We used C# language and MS-SQL database, and input FOAF and RSS as data collected from livejournal.com. The implemented result shows that foaf : interest of users has reached an average of 19 percent increase for four weeks. In proportion to the increased foaf : interest change, the number of foaf : knows of users has grown an average of 9 percent for four weeks. As we use FOAF and RSS as basic data which have a wide support in web 2.0 and social network service, we have a definite advantage in utilizing user data distributed in the diverse web sites and services regardless of language and types of computer. By using suggested method in this paper, we can provide better services coping with the rapid change of user interests with the automatic application of FOAF.