Ontologies are us: A unified model of social networks and semantics

In our work the traditional bipartite model of ontologies is extended with the social dimension, leading to a tripartite model of actors, concepts and instances. We demonstrate the application of this representation by showing how community-based semantics emerges from this model through a process of graph transformation. We illustrate ontology emergence by two case studies, an analysis of a large scale folksonomy system and a novel method for the extraction of community-based ontologies from Web pages.