A Study towards Application-driven Social Network Analysis

Social network is a social structure of nodes that are tied by various kinds of relationships, such as kinships, friends, web links, colleagues, citation links, etc. Recently, large on-line social networks have become very popular among web users. In this paper, we present a thoroughly overview towards the recent efforts in social network research from a graph data management perspective. We identify a series of research areas that have drew much attention in last few years, such as viral marketing, community identification, information diffusion, link prediction and evolution analysis, social influence study and privacy issues. In each of these areas, we present a detailed comparison over a series of corresponding approaches showing their pros and cons, based on which we conclude and summarize some future research directions and potential applications for each of these areas.