We describe our work in the collection and analysis of massive data describing the connections between participants to online social networks. Alternative approaches to social network data collection are defined and evaluated in practice, against the popular Facebook Web site. Thanks to our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawlers, two large samples, comprising millions of connections, have been collected; the data is anonymous and organized as an undirected graph. We describe a set of tools that we developed to analyze specific properties of such social-network graphs, i.e., among others, degree distribution, centrality measures, scaling laws and distribution of friendship.
S. A. Catanese et al. REF author narrated the collection and analysis of huge data describing the connections between participants in online social networks.
Crawling Facebook for Social Network Analysis Purposes
Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics, 2011
Computer Science Physics