Towards a Unified Semantic Model for Online Social Networks to Ensure Interoperability and Aggregation for Analysis
The Online Social Networks (OSN) have a positive evolution due to the diversity of social media and the increase in the number of users. The revenue of the social media organizations is generated from the analysis of users' profiles and behaviors, knowing that surfers maintain several accounts on different OSNs. To satisfy its users, the social media organizations have initiated projects for ensuring interoperability to allow for users creating other accounts on other OSN using an initial account, and sharing content from one media to others. Believing that the future generations of Internet will be based on the semantic web technologies, multiple academic and industrial projects have emerged with the objective of modeling semantically the OSNs to ensure interoperability or data aggregation and analysis. In this chapter, we present related works and argue the necessity of a unified semantic model (USM) for OSNs; we introduce a kernel of a USM using standard social ontologies to support the principal social media and it can be extended to support other future social media.