An Analysis Tool for Social Networks and Other Relational Data

In recent years, social networking has become an integral part of life for students, professionals, and the general population alike. With different sites catering to different types of people, there are more and more ways for people to get involved. Social networks have gone beyond a casual hobby and have the potential to shape the ways people go about everyday life. As these sites grow in popularity, many people have amassed large networks with various types of connections to other users. As a result, while only a small amount of data may be available about a given individual, there is likely a vast amount of information about people they have chosen to be connected to through these websites. And as more people join every day, people’s networks are expanding as more opportunities to establish links come about. This phenomenon is relatively new, so research in the area of social network data is young, but growing quickly. In order to aid future research on social networks, a software package was developed to allow analysis on network data. It was developed with the intention of being an allpurpose research tool, with the ability to store large amounts of data and do simple analysis on it. Users are able to create networks and output their findings, based on a few simple output options. A custom query language was also developed with the system in order to allow users to examine whole networks at a time and ask network-based questions, rather than focus on the individuals.