Social Network Data Retrieving Using Semantic Technology

Online social networking is a trend of communication in the modern society, which generates large amounts of unstructured and unmanaged user data daily. Accesses to the data on the social network platforms are usually restricted and sometimes even blocked. In this paper, a semantic technology is used to build up an application that can analyze data on Facebook, which is currently the largest social network. The application, called as "semantic search tool", is used to expose relationships of interested subjects, mainly the common friends or interests of a group of people. Once authorized by the users themselves, it will collect the user\´s relevant personal information, convert it into semantic format, and store it in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) file, which will be exported to a database in the form of RDF triple. The RDF triple database can further be used with SPARQL query language to construct the semantic searches. Experiments show that users can accurately acquire the requested information that they intend to access semantically.