Navigating and Annotating Semantically-Enabled Networks of People and Associated Objects

Social spaces such as blogs, wikis and online social networking sites are enabling the formation of online communities where people are linked to each other through direct profile connections and also through the content items that they are creating, sharing and tagging. As these spaces become bigger and more distributed, more intuitive ways of navigating the associated information become necessary. The Semantic Web aims to link identifiable objects to each other and to textual strings via relationships and attributes respectively, and provides a platform for gathering diverse information from heterogeneous sources and performing operations on such linked data. In this paper, we will demonstrate how this linked semantic data can provide an enhanced view of the activity in a social network, and how the Galaxy tool described in this work can augment objects from social spaces, by highlighting related people and objects, and suggesting relevant sources of knowledge.