OntOSN—An integrated ontology for the business-driven analysis of online social networks

Abstract

The analysis of Online Social Networks (OSN) like Facebook is an emerging field of research and of high relevance for businesses in order to derive information about current and prospective customers. Generally, OSN analysis requires the participation of different stakeholders; for example domain experts, data mining experts and IT engineers. Each of these groups operates with specific modeling approaches what can cause communication problems, redundancy or model discrepancies. We proclaim the design of an integrated ontology for OSN analysis in order to avoid these problems. Therefore, a set of requirements on the aimed ontology is evolved based on characteristic use cases coming from specific business purposes. In a second step, a range of existing ontologies are examined and compared with the elaborated requirements. Finally, the OntOSN ontology is designed.