The research presented in this article is motivated by the increasing importance of complex human relations in linked data, either extracted from social networks, or found in existing databases. The FOAF vocabulary, targeted in our research, plays a central role in those data, and is a model for lightweight ontologies largely used in linked data, such as the DBpedia ontology and schema.org. We provide an overview of FOAF and other approaches for describing human relations, followed by a detailed analysis and critique of the FOAF Relationship Vocabulary, the most important FOAF extension. We propose an explicit formal axiomatization of this vocabulary, and an ontological analysis concerning the properties used to describe human relationships. We analyze the distribution of human relations based on their epistemological status, and define an ontoepistemic meta-property as characteristic of some of these predicates. Our analysis is generalizable to semantic modeling of social networks. Additionally, the modeling patterns used in other relevant linked data vocabularies are analyzed for comparison.
Auer, S., Demter, J., Martin, M. & Lehmann, J. (2012). LODStats – An extensible framework for high-performance dataset analytics. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’12), Galway City, Ireland. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
2.
Berners-Lee, T. (2009). LinkedData. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html.
3.
Berners-Lee, T., Chen, Y., Chilton, L., Connolly, D., Dhanaraj, R., Hollenbach, J., Lerer, A. & Sheets, D. (2006). Tabulator: Exploring and analyzing linked data on the semantic web. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Semantic Web User Interaction Workshop, Athens, Georgia, USA, November 6, 2006.
4.
Bizer, Ch., Cyganiak, R. & Heath, T. (2007). How to publish linked data on the web, http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/.
5.
Bizer, Ch., Heath, T. & Berners-Lee, T. (2009). Linked data – The story so far. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 5(3), 1–22. doi:10.4018/jswis.2009081901.
6.
Bizer, Ch., Heath, T., Idehen, K. & Berners-Lee, T. (2008). Linked data on the web. In Huaiet al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2008), Beijing, China, April 21–25, 2008 (pp. 1265–1266). doi:10.1145/1367497.1367760.
7.
Brentano, F. (1874). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (pp. 88–89). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
8.
Brickley, D. & Miller, L. (2010). FOAF Vocabulary Specification 0.97. http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/. January 2010.
9.
Chisholm, R. (1982). Knowledge as Justified True Belief. The Foundations of Knowing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
10.
Clark, P. & Porter, B. (1997). Building concept representations from reusable components. In AAAI’97 (pp. 369–376). CA: AAAI Press.
11.
Davidson, D. (1967). The logical form of action sentences. In The Logic of Decision and Action. University of Pittsburgh Press.
12.
Frege, G. (1892). Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100, 25–50. (Translation: On sense and reference. In P. Geach and M. Black (Eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (3rd ed.). Blackwell. 1980).
13.
Gabbay, D.M. & Guenthner, F. (Eds.) (2003). Handbook of Philosophical Logic (Vol. 10). Springer.
14.
Gangemi, A. (2005). Ontology design patterns for semantic web content. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Semantic Web Conference 2005 (pp. 262–276).
15.
Gangemi, A. (2008). Norms and plans as unification criteria for social collectives. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 17(1), 70–112. doi:10.1007/s10458-008-9038-9.
16.
Gangemi, A. & Mika, P. (2003). Understanding the semantic web through descriptions and situations. In R.Meersman, Z.Tari, D.Schmidtet al. (Eds.), On The Move 2003 Conferences (OTM2003). Springer.
17.
Gangemi, A., Navigli, R. & Velardi, P. (2003). The OntoWordNet Project: Extension and axiomatisation of conceptual relations in WordNet. In International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2003), Catania, Italy.
18.
Guizzardi, G., Wagner, G., Guarino, N. & van Sinderen, M. (2004). An ontologically well-founded profile for UML conceptual models. In A.Persson and J.Stirna (Eds.), Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Proceedings of 16th CAiSE Conference. Riga: Springer.
19.
Jacob, P. (2010). Intentionality. In E.N.Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Fall 2010 ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/intentionality.
20.
Lakemeyer, G. (1993). All they know: A study in multi-agent autoepistemic reasoning. In Proc. of the 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-93) (pp. 376–381).
21.
Longo, C., Gangemi, A. & Cantone, D. (2013). Representing Kinship relations on the semantic web. In Proceedings of OWLED 2013. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1080/.
22.
Marek, W. & Truszczynski, M. (1991). Autoepistemic logic. Journal of the ACM, 38(3), 588–619. doi:10.1145/116825.116836.
23.
Masolo, C., Bottazzi, E., Catanacci, C., Ferrario, R., Gangemi, A. & Guarino, N. (2004). Social roles and their descriptions. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. AAAI Press.
24.
Matsuo, Y., Hamasaki, M., Mori, J., Takeda, H. & Hasida, K. (2004). Ontological consideration on human relationship vocabulary for FOAF. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and Semantic Web, Galway, Ireland.
25.
Mika, P. & Gangemi, A. (2004). Descriptions of social relations. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web, Galway, Ireland.
26.
Moore, R.C. (1985). Semantical considerations on non-monotonic logic. In Artif. Int. (Vol. 28, pp. 75–94).
27.
Nuzzolese, A.G., Gangemi, A. & Presutti, V. (2011). Encyclopedic knowledge patterns from Wikipedia page links. In Proceedings of ISWC2011, the Ninth International Semantic Web Conference. Springer.
28.
Paulheim, H. & Gangemi, A. (2015). Serving DBpedia with DOLCE – More than just adding a cherry on top. In Proceedings of ISWC2015, the Thirteenth International Semantic Web Conference. Springer.
29.
Presutti, V., Aroyo, L., Adamou, A., Schopman, B., Gangemi, A. & Schreiber, G. (2011). Extracting core knowledge from linked data. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Consuming Linked Data, COLD2011, Workshop in Conjunction with the 10th International Semantic Web Conference 2011 (ISWC 2011). http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-781/.
30.
Quine, W.V.O. (1960). Word and Object. MIT Press.
31.
Reich, J.R. (2000). Ontological design patterns: Modelling the metadata of molecular biological ontologies, information and knowledge. In DEXA 2000.
32.
Rescher, N. (2005). Epistemic Logic: A Survey of the Logic of Knowledge. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press.
33.
Robb, D. & Heil, J. (2009). Mental causation. In E.N.Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Summer 2009 ed.
34.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. In Mind (Vol. 14). Basil Blackwell.
35.
Russell, B. (1911). Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series) (Vol. XI(1910–1911), pp. 108–128).
36.
Sauermann, L., Cyganiak, R. & Völkel, M. (2007). Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. Germany: DFKI GmbH, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH. Technical Memo TM-07-01.
37.
Schiffer, S. (1992). Belief ascription. The Journal of Philosophy, 89(10), 499–521. doi:10.2307/2941005.
38.
Stevens, R. & Lord, P. (2010). Reification of properties in an ontology. In Ontogenesis. http://ontogenesis.knowledgeblog.org/993.
39.
Stuart, D. (2012). FOAF Within UK Academic Web Space: A Webometric Analysis of the Semantic Web. In G.Widén and K.Holmberg (Eds.), Social Information Research, Library and Information Science, Vol. 5, pp. 173–191. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
40.
Svátek, V. (2004). Design patterns for semantic web ontologies: Motivation and discussion. In 7th Conference on Business Information Systems, Poznan, Poland.
