Data Acquisition in Social Networks: Issues and Proposals
Claudia Canali, Michele Colajanni, Riccardo Lancellotti · 2011
Abstract. The amount of information that is possible to gather from social networks may be useful to different contexts ranging from marketing to intelligence. In this paper, we describe the three main techniques for data acquisition in social networks, the conditions under which they can be applied, and the open problems. Wethenfocusonthemainissuesthatcrawlershavetoaddressforgettingdatafrom social networks, and we propose a novel solution that exploits the cloud computing paradigm for crawling. The proposed crawler is modular by design and relies on a largenumberofdistributednodesandontheMapReduceframeworktospeedupthe data collection process from largesocial networks. 1