Temporal Social Network: Storage, Indexing and Query
Processing
∗
Xiaoying Chen
1
, Chong Zhang
2
, Bin Ge
3
, Weidong Xiao
4
∗
Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Laboratory
National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
+
Collaborative Innovation Center of Geospatial Technology, China
{
1
chenxiaoying1991,
2
leocheung8286}@yahoo.com
3
gebin1978@gmail.com,
4
wilsonshaw@vip.sina.com
ABSTRACT
With the increasing of requirements from many aspects, var-
ious queries and analyses arise focusing on social network.
Queries like finding users, friends or social activities satis-
fying a certain period gives temporal insights into retrieval
or statistics, hence augmenting temporal query capability
in such context, temporal social network (TSN), is mean-
ingful. We propose three kinds temporal queries in social
network, aiming to explore temporal dimension in users, re-
lationships and social activities. A storage model is designed
to logically and physically represent TSN, and then we pro-
pose two index structures, TUR-tree and TUA-tree for ac-
celerating query process. Query processing algorithms are
designed for the three queries, and we evaluate our idea on
a dataset which is synthetically generated from real dataset,
and experimental results show that our indexes and query
processing are effective and scalable.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.2.4 [Database Management]: Systems - query processing
General Terms
Algorithms, Measurement, Performance
Keywords
Social Network, Temporal, Storage, Index, Query Process-
ing
1. INTRODUCTION
Online social networks have become more and more popu-
lar, numerous sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
∗
This work is supported by NSF of China grant 61303062
and 71331008.
c
2016, Copyright is with the authors. Published in the Workshop Pro-
ceedings of the EDBT/ICDT 2016 Joint Conference (March 15, 2016, Bor-
deaux, France) on CEUR-WS.org (ISSN 1613-0073). Distribution of this
paper is permitted under the terms of the Creative Commons license CC-
by-nc-nd 4.0
allow users to interact and share content using social links.
Based on vast amount of information contained in social
networks, personalized and expressive search features are es-
sential for users, vendors or third-parties based on different
purposes. In various kinds of data, time is a common and
necessary dimension in social networks. For instance, when
a user logins or logouts the community system, there is often
a time stamp recording such action. When two users become
friends, a time stamp also records this event, and similar for
unfriending case. Similarly, when a user posts text, photo,
video, or comments others’ posts, or shares web links, these
social activities are all recorded with time stamps.
When these temporal information is taken into consider-
ation in an ordinary query for social networks, it becomes
interesting to discover that some historical insights are as-
sociated with the results, e.g., find some users who are ac-
tive during a certain period, or find pairs of friends valid
in some year, or find some activities posted at some time.
Such queries add temporal axes for user requirement, which
is able to distinguish old and new, or active and inactive
users, friends or activities. However, such kind of query
functions are not studied well in academic community, nor
developed in industrial platforms.
In this paper, our goal is to explore temporal queries in
social networks associated with time dimension, we call it
temporal social networks (TSN). And we focus on the fol-
lowing three kinds of queries.
(1) Friends of Interesting Activities (FIA) query.
FIA queries aim to find a user’s friends who are involved in
some given social activities. For instance, George wants to
find which friends of him post the texts containing coffee and
pasta during last two weeks. This query would help users to
find interesting events or people along the time axis.
(2) Users of Time Filter (UTF) query. UTF queries
aim to find certain users who are not only active during a
given time interval, i.e., the period of logon status intersects
with the given time interval, but also whose friends take
part in some given interesting activities. For example, a
fashion advertiser plans to look for some users who are active
in recent month, and the user’s friends have taken part in
the social activities containing boot, because the advertiser
wants to persuade the users to buy their products utilizing
influence from the friendships.
(3) Group of Users with Relationship Duration (GU
RD) query. GURD queries aim to find a set of groups,
where the number of users in each group is equal to a given