A Generic Architecture for a Social Network Monitoring and Analysis System

This paper describes the architecture and a partial implementation of a system designed for the monitoring and analysis of communities at social media sites. The main contribution of the paper is a novel system architecture that facilitates long-term monitoring of diverse social networks existing and emerging at various social media sites. It consists of three main modules, the crawler, the repository and the analyzer. The first module can be adapted to crawl different sites based on ontology describing the structure of the site. The repository stores the crawled and analyzed persistent data using efficient data structures. It can be implemented using special purpose graph databases and/or object-relational database. The analyzer hosts modules that can be used for various graph and multimedia contents analysis tasks. The results can be again stored to the repository, and so on. All modules can be run concurrently.