Extracting social networks among various entities on the web

Social networks have recently attracted much attention for their importance to the Semantic Web. Several methods exist to extract social networks for people (particularly researchers) from the web using a search engine. Our goal is to expand existing techniques to obtain social networks among various entities. This paper proposes two improvements, i.e. relation identification and threshold tuning, which enable us to deal with complex and inhomogeneous communities. Social networks among firms and artists (of contemporary) are extracted as examples: Several evaluations emphasize the effectiveness of these methods. Our system was used at the International Triennale of Contemporary Art (Yokohama Triennale 2005) to facilitate navigation of artists' information. This study contributes to the Semantic Web in that we increase the applicability of social network extraction for several studies.