X-RIME: Cloud-Based Large Scale Social Network Analysis

As an important technique in modern sociology, social network analysis has gained a lot of attention from many disciplines, and been used as important complements to traditional statistics and data analysis. In order to make it affordable for analysts with massive and fast growing networks, we present X-RIME, a cloud-based library for large scale social network analysis. We propose an implementation-oriented classification of social network analysis structures and structure variables to guide the implementation of them over MapReduce parallel programming model. The layered architecture of the library is described along with design consideration of each layer. By sharing the same infrastructure and integrating with existing cloud-based data warehouse and data mining libraries and tools, more comprehensive and cost effective social network aware business intelligence solutions could be built. We present several case studies on an online community to illustrate the usage of X-RIME library. The performance of the library is evaluated with experiments, which demonstrates good scalability.