Mailing Lists and Social Semantic Web

Abstract

Electronic Mailing lists are a key part of the Internet. They have enabled the development of social communities who share and exchange knowledge in specialized and general domains. In this chapter the auhtors describe methods to capture some of that knowledge which will enable the development of new datasets using Semantic Web technologies. In particular, the authors present the SWAML project, which collects data from mailing lists. They also describe smushing techniques that normalize RDF datasets capturing different resources that identify the same one. They have applied those techniques to identify persons through the mailing lists of open source communities. These techniques have been tested using a dataset automatically extracted from several online open source communities.