3rd International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE 2013), October 31 & November 1, 2013, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad PAD: A Semantic Social Network Samad Paydar, Mohsen Kahani, Fatane Zarrinkalam Web Technology Lab., dept. of Computer Engineering Ferdowsi University of Mashhad Mashhad, Iran samad.paydar@stu-mail.um.ac.ir, kahani@um.ac.ir, fattane.zarrinkalam@stu-mail.um.ac.ir Abstract- In this paper, PAD is introduced which is a semantic social network developed at Ferdowsi Universit of Mashhad. It uses the semantic web technologies in different ways: First it publishes parts of the social network data as Linked Data. It uses semantic web sources for automatic annotation of the social network entities with resources on the semantic web. Finally it uses the semantic web sources to collect required background or domain knowledge for the purpose of recommending items to the social network users. PAD has been designed to provide a medium through which people at Ferdowsi Universit of Mashhad can share their interests and knowledge, and also to provide a native infrastructure for Iranian researchers in different domains like semantic web, social networks, recommendation systems, and knowledge management. In this paper, architecture of PAD is described and different aspects in which PAD is related to the semantic web are discussed. Keywords- Semantic Web; Social Network; Linked Data; Annotation; Semantic Social Network I. INTRODUCTION From a social point of view, social networks can be considered as the most successfl application of the web in the daily life of people. They enable people to easily connect with each other, communicate and share photos, posts and interests. On the other hand, fom a technical point of view, semantic web is one of the most essential visions considered for the web. Its mission is to make the web an environment in which not only people, but also machines can understand semantic of the contents published. The integration of these two successfl technologies has been interesting for many researchers and as a result, semantic social networks are emerged which utilize the semantic web technologies to improve different processes associated with social networks [18]. In this paper, PAD! is introduced which is a semantic social network developed at Ferdowsi Universit of Mashhad. Its aim has been to utilize the semantic web technologies to create a social network trough which people at Ferdowsi Universit of Mashhad can share their interests and knowledge. In addition, another goal that PAD is expected to address is to provide a native infastucture with real data for Iranian researchers in different domains like semantic web, social networks, recommendation systems, and knowledge management. 1 PAD is an abbreviation taken from \: I... I.1 .��' 978-1-4799-2093-8/13/$31,00 ©2013 IEEE PAD is implemented and it is in the early days of its deployment2• It is interesting to see how it can contibute to knowledge dissemination across its target community. In this paper, architecture of PAD is discussed and different aspects in which PAD is related to the semantic web are discussed. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section 11 the related works are briefy reviewed. Section III describes the architecture of PAD, and Section IV discusses different aspects fom which PAD is related to the semantic web. Finally, section V concludes the paper by mentioning some fture works. 11. RELATED WORK Web was originally emerged as a medium of communicating infonnation between scientists and academic people. Later, as the web based systems evolved, web started to act as a medium for publishing and accessing business processes across the interet. During the last decade, with the emergence of Web 2.0 and its associated technologies, web has become more and more social in the sense that not only computer experts or scientist, but any person can contribute to evolution of the web by simply disseminating his ideas, information, and interests [15], [13]. Social networks, as one of the technologies of Web 2.0, have greatly increased users' involvement on the web. They allow users to communicate with each other based on their commonalities, and easily share whatever they are interested in [3], e.g. photos, video clips, and bookmarks. Despite interesting success stories attibuted to well known social networks like Facebook3, they also have some limitations [17]. While it is easy to share data on a single social network, it is much challenging to share it across different social networks, because each network has its own data schema and conceptual space [8]. This portability limitation is very important since usually people are simultaneously involved in multiple social networks. If a user decides to migrate fom a social network to another, there is no solution available for transfering all his data, including his fiends community, fom the source to the destination social network [10]. Another issue is that the simplicity of sharing data on social networks leads to a large volume of unstuctured 2 http://pad.um.ac.ir 3 http://www.facebook.com