On-Line Analytical Processing on Graphs Generated from Social Network Data
Abstract
Social Network services have quickly become a powerful means by
which people share real-time messages. Typically, social networks are modeled
as large underlying graphs. Responding to this emerging trend, it becomes
critically important to interactively view and analyze this massive amount of
data from different perspectives and with multiple granularities. While Online
analytical processing (OLAP) is a powerful primitive for structured data
analysis, it faces major challenges in manipulating this complex interconnecting
data. In this paper, we suggest a new data warehousing model, namely
Social Graph Cube to support OLAP technologies on multidimensional social
networks. Based on the proposed model we represent data as heterogeneous information
graphs for more comprehensive illustration than the traditional OLAP
technology. Going beyond traditional OLAP operations, Social Graph Cube
proposes a new method that combines data mining area and OLAP operators to
navigate through dimension hierarchies. Experimental results show the effectiveness
of Social Graph Cube for decision-making.