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Crawling and Mining Social Media Networks: A Facebook Case

Authors:
Abd El Salam Al Hajjar
Haissam Hajjar
Mazen El Sayed
Mohammad Hajjar

Keywords: data crawling and mining; social media network; Facebook; HTML; PHP; MySQL; database

Abstract:
Social media is computer-mediated tool that allows people to create, share or exchange information, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. The most popular social media in these days is Facebook. This paper treats the problems of web crawling and mining. More precisely, we focus our intention on Facebook information extraction, and its importance in gathering data and tracking people. Also, we focus on the crawling mechanism of several Facebook pages and extracting the data contained in it and finally storing it in our database. Specifically, we extract the basic information, such as home town, age, work, education, friends list, events and other information. At first, we describe the content of Facebook web pages and the principle of web crawling and mining. Second, we propose the architecture of our system, which allows extracting the Facebook information, for a specific user logged in. The result of our work is an automated system that takes a Facebook user as an input, extracts recursively the list of friends for this user, and returns the friends information (name, university, etc.).

Pages: 76 to 80

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: June 21, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3972

ISBN: 978-1-61208-412-1

Location: Brussels, Belgium

Dates: from June 21, 2015 to June 26, 2015