Temporal Social Network: Storage, Indexing and Query Processing

With the increasing of requirements from many aspects, various queries and analyses arise focusing on social network. Queries like finding users, friends or social activities satisfying a certain period gives temporal insights into retrieval or statistics, hence augmenting temporal query capability in such context, temporal social network (TSN), is meaningful. We propose three kinds temporal queries in social network, aiming to explore temporal dimension in users, relationships and social activities. A storage model is designed to logically and physically represent TSN, and then we propose two index structures, TUR-tree and TUA-tree for accelerating query process. Query processing algorithms are designed for the three queries, and we evaluate our idea on a dataset which is synthetically generated from real dataset, and experimental results show that our indexes and query processing are effective and scalable.