DATA MODELING AND QUERY PROCESSING FOR ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING SERVICES

Abstract

Web2.0 boosts the proliferation of online social networking services. Nowadays, online Social Networking Sites (SNSs) has become a fast-growing business in the Internet. Hundreds of millions of individual users create online profiles and share personal information with their friends on these sites, which facilitates a high level of user personalization and user inter-communication. The users publish their creations called User Generated Content (UGC) such as bookmarks, pictures, videos and blogposts to entertain others or to be entertained by other users¿ contributions. Therefore popular online social networking sites possess huge web communities and contain enormous collections of content generated by their users. Consequently, the dramatically growing online social networking data is becoming more and more complex, heterogeneous and temporal, and it becomes more and more challenging to manage such data.

In the past decades, various database models have been proposed by the database research community as the conceptual frameworks which provide the foundations to solve data management problems for a specific domain. However, as far as we know, existing database models, query languages and access methods do not offer adequate and native support for the representation, management, querying and especially inter-operability of online social networking data. To meet this challenge, we choose to move beyond the traditional approach. In this thesis we present the concept and design of an expressive standard graph data model, which gives clients easy control over data. We also provide a detailed illustration of the operators, SNG-Algebra and the query language SNGQL designed for the new graph database system. The graphical formalism in this thesis for online social networking data offers high expressibility and adequate modeling power.