I know who you clicked last summer

'I'm not stalking, I'm just investigating' - Who hasn't ever heard this sentence from one of their friends? Whether it concerns connecting people and interest groups or item recommendations - most of the possibilities of the WWW today are based on the idea of networking. MySpace, Facebook or its German counterpart StudiVZ, just to name a few, are very popular communities these days, which aim at connecting people. All of those communities can be modelled as social networks allowing an automatic analysis to reveal interesting facts.

In this talk I would like to introduce some of the technologies one could use to analyze such a network. While the list of algorithms and approaches is long, I want to emphasize on the things one can find out even using simple techniques. In order to do so, I will work on some data collected from a popular community to show some possibilities of analyzing.

My procedure will include an introduction to:

• basic concepts of graphs and (social) networks
• types of networks and possibilities for modelling
  • one-mode and two-mode networks
  • modelling possibilities
• basic measures of networks and some algorithms of network and graph theory
  • connectivity
  • importance
  • paths and distances
• fancy things you can do by enhancing everything with an ontology
• example network analysis on the basis of a real community

So, if you ever wanted to get an introduction to social network analysis, graph theory and its potentials, attend this talk!