1 research outputs found
The Four Dimensions of Social Network Analysis: An Overview of Research Methods, Applications, and Software Tools
Social network based applications have experienced exponential growth in
recent years. One of the reasons for this rise is that this application domain
offers a particularly fertile place to test and develop the most advanced
computational techniques to extract valuable information from the Web. The main
contribution of this work is three-fold: (1) we provide an up-to-date
literature review of the state of the art on social network analysis (SNA);(2)
we propose a set of new metrics based on four essential features (or
dimensions) in SNA; (3) finally, we provide a quantitative analysis of a set of
popular SNA tools and frameworks. We have also performed a scientometric study
to detect the most active research areas and application domains in this area.
This work proposes the definition of four different dimensions, namely Pattern
& Knowledge discovery, Information Fusion & Integration, Scalability, and
Visualization, which are used to define a set of new metrics (termed degrees)
in order to evaluate the different software tools and frameworks of SNA (a set
of 20 SNA-software tools are analyzed and ranked following previous metrics).
These dimensions, together with the defined degrees, allow evaluating and
measure the maturity of social network technologies, looking for both a
quantitative assessment of them, as to shed light to the challenges and future
trends in this active area.Comment: This paper is currently under evaluation in Information Fusion
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