PAD: A semantic social network

In this paper, PAD is introduced which is a semantic social network developed at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. It uses the semantic web technologies in different ways: First it publishes parts of the social network data as Linked Data. It uses semantic web sources for automatic annotation of the social network entities with resources on the semantic web. Finally it uses the semantic web sources to collect required background or domain knowledge for the purpose of recommending items to the social network users. PAD has been designed to provide a medium through which people at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad can share their interests and knowledge, and also to provide a native infrastructure for Iranian researchers in different domains like semantic web, social networks, recommendation systems, and knowledge management. In this paper, architecture of PAD is described and different aspects in which PAD is related to the semantic web are discussed.