The Design And Development Of Analytical Applications For Online Social Network Visualization

With the continuous development of Social Networking Sites, people's online networks of relationship are growing bigger and bigger. Social Network reflects lots of information about the user, such as industry, friends, hobby, geographical region, and so on. To obtain this information, it is necessary to analyze the social network.The most important method of social network analysis is visualization, which turns the data of relations into node-edge graph and then studies the position and distribution of nodes and edges. Nowadays, many of the studies have been done by software like Pajek and Ucinent. This software is difficult to operate and requires users to have certain professionalism, thus ordinary users like the social network site users can hardly get involved in. However, it is these ordinary users, who created these large number of online social network data.Answering to this condition, the author developed an social network visualizing application for users of SNS sites to analyze their online relations. This web application get user data from sina microblog API, then visualizing the data into a network diagram.The main work of the paper is as follows:first, study the various methods of social network visualization, and choose the undirected graph to be the method in this case; then, compare some well-developed undirected graph layout algorithm, and select F-R algorithm in this case, because it has better layout, and considerably simple to realize; after that is the interaction design, and author also made a detailed description of the technical difficulties she encountered and the way to solve them; finally, author summarized the feedbacks about the application after it published in sina microblog application platform.The web application meets the need of social network service users, complete the development and deployment of the application using little resources and are well received by users. The author hopes that this practice can be a good example of similar studies in related areas.