Modeling social ties with an object oriented approach

Abstract

With the widely usage of online social networks, people come to realize the necessity of making the social network more semantic. However, the lack of definition of connections hinders the fully applications of online social networks and transform them towards more semantic way. So in this paper, we try to overcome this problem by modeling the social tie connection in online social networks with an object-oriented approach based on extended RDF vocabulary. In our method, the connections are modeled as object entity, with attributes describing their content, and operations defining the legal manipulation upon them. The connections have inheritance relationships between them and thus form an inheritance tree. We presented our consideration in designing the object-oriented model of connection; and developed a prototype to show its advantages over the traditional approach.