Snsanalyser: uma ferramenta para extração e análise de redes sociais a partir de comunidades existentes em sites de relacionamento

Abstract

With the growth in the number of social networking sites, an important data source emerged and has been expanding continuously. Finding a way to extract relationship information from social networking sites using only the user pages and their interests or characteristics as searching criteria is a challenge, since most of those sites have databases of millions of users. In this context, it s clear the usefulness of a solution to extract and analyze social networks from relationship sites. This work describes a tool implemented for this purpose. In addition to its technical characteristics and development process, this thesis also presents a case study in which the tool is applied to the analysis of social networks extracted from existing communities of a well know social networking site. The work is based on concepts related to the themes of information retrieval, web mining and social networks analysis. The main contribution of this work is to propose a solution that allows exploring and analyzing networks composed of Internet users around the world, selected by profile or specific characteristics, directly from their social networking web pages, without the usage of specific APIs provided by the site administration companies.