Springer Nature
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 Linked Data initiative to connect previously disconnected datasets, is making it possible to connect data from across various social spaces through common representations and agreed upon terms for people, content items, etc. In this book, we detail some current research being carried out to semantically represent the implicit and explicit structures on the Social Web, along with the techniques being used to elicit relevant knowledge from these structures, and we present the mechanisms that can be used to intelligently mesh these semantic representations with intelligent knowledge discovery…