Semantically Interconnected Social Networks

Social network analysis aims to identify collaborations and helps people organize themselves through community participation and information sharing. The primary sources for social network modelling are explicit relationships such as co-authoring, citations, friendship, etc. However, to enable the integration of on-line community information and to fully describe the content and structure of community sites, secondary sources of information, such as documents, e-mails, blogs and discussions, can be exploited. In this paper we describe a methodology and a battery of tools to automatically extract from documents the relevant topics shared among community members and to analyse the evolution of the network also in terms of emergence and decay of collaboration themes. Experiments are conducted on a scientific network funded by the European Community, the INTEROP network of excellence, and on the United Kingdom research community in medical image understanding and analysis.