Applying Social Network Analysis to Analyze a Web-Based Community
Journal Title: International Journal of Advanced Computer Science & Applications - Year 2012, Vol 3, Issue 2
Abstract
This paper deals with a very renowned website (that is Book-Crossing) from two angles: The first angle focuses on the direct relations between users and books. Many things can be inferred from this part of analysis such as who is more interested in book reading than others and why? Which books are most popular and which users are most active and why? The task requires the use of certain social network analysis measures (e.g. degree centrality). What does it mean when two users like the same book? Is it the same when other two users have one thousand books in common? Who is more likely to be a friend of whom and why? Are there specific people in the community who are more qualified to establish large circles of social relations? These questions (and of course others) were answered through the other part of the analysis, which will take us to probe the potential social relations between users in this community. Although these relationships do not exist explicitly, they can be inferred with the help of affiliation network analysis and techniques such as m-slice. Book-Crossing dataset, which covered four weeks of users' activities during 2004, has always been the focus of investigation for researchers interested in discovering patterns of users' preferences in order to offer the most possible accurate recommendations. However; the implicit social relationships among users that emerge (when putting users in groups based on similarity in book preferences) did not gain the same amount of attention. This could be due to the importance recommender systems attain these days (as compared to other research fields) as a result to the rapid spread of e-commerce websites that seek to market their products online. Certain social network analysis software, namely Pajek, was used to explore different structural aspects of this community such as brokerage roles, triadic constraints and levels of cohesion. Some overall statistics were also obtained such as network density, average geodesic distance and average degree.
Authors and Affiliations
Mohammed Al-Taie , Seifedine Kadry
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP103317
- DOI 10.14569/IJACSA.2012.030206
- Views 87
- Downloads 0
Isolated Automatic Speech Recognition of Quechua Numbers using MFCC, DTW and KNN
The Automatic Speech (ASR) area is defined as the transformation of acoustic signals into string words. This area has been being developed for many year facilitating the lives of people so it was implemented in several l...
An Architectural Decision Tool Based on Scenarios and Non-functional Requirements
Software architecture design is often based on architects intuition and previous experience. Little methodological support is available, but there are still no effective solutions to guide the architectural design. The m...
A Novel Architecture for Information Security using Division and Pixel Matching Techniques
The computer users have to safeguard the information which they are handling. An information hiding algorithm has to make sure that such information is undecipherable since it may have some sensitive information. This pa...
A Survey of Spam Detection Methods on Twitter
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms that has 313 million monthly active users which post 500 million tweets per day. This popularity attracts the attention of spammers who use Twitter for their mali...
Self-regulating Message Throughput in Enterprise Messaging Servers – A Feedback Control Solution
Enterprise Messaging is a very popular message exchange concept in asynchronous distributed computing environments. The Enterprise Messaging Servers are heavily used in building business critical Enterprise applic...