Social Network Data Analytics Social Network Data Analytics

The advent of online social networks has been one of the most exciting events in this decade. Many popular online social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook have become increasingly popular. In addition, a number of multimedia networks such as Flickr have also seen an increasing level of popularity in recent years. Many such social networks are extremely rich in content, and they typically contain a tremendous amount of content and linkage data which can be leveraged for analysis. The linkage data is essentially the graph structure of the social network and the communications between entities; whereas the content data contains the text, images and other multimedia data in the network. The richness of this network provides unprecedented opportunities for data analytics in the context of social networks. This book provides a data-centric view of online social networks; a topic which has been missing from much of the literature. This chapter provides an overview of the key topics in this field, and their coverage in this book.