REGULATION -2013

ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-2017

B.Tech Information Technology

CS6010 -Social Networks Analysis
UNIT 5
PART A
1. What is visualization of online social networks?
As the fast development of the Internet, many online social network services are
created to connect social relationships among people. Versatile visualization skills are
employed to facilitate analyzing online social networks, and more in-depth studies have been
investigated to improve the presentation of online social networks.
2. Give the taxonomy of visualization.
1D/Linear
2D/Planar (incl. Geospatial)
3D/Volumetric Temporal
ND/Multidimensional Tree/Hierarchical

Network

3. Give examples for different types of visualization.

user-centric visualization - Club Nexus, Vizster, People Entity Cube,

content-centric visualization - as visualizations for citation and cocitation social

networks.

hybrid visualization - , Themail,TouchGraph, and IRNet.

4. What are the two approaches to structural visualization?
Ontology-based Visualization.
Temporal Visualization
5. State the purpose of visualization.
A visualizations purpose is the communication of data. That means that the data must
come from something that is abstract or at least not immediately visible (like the inside of the
human body). This rules out photography and image processing. Visualization transforms from
the invisible to the visible.
6. Define proximity of nodes.
On the very detailed level (i.e., node level) of link analysis, we want to figure out the
relationship between two nodes on the graph, such as proximity, association, correlation and
causality. For proximity, the goal is to measure the closeness (a.k.a, relevance, or similarity)
between two nodes.
For many types of real graphs (i.e. social network), traditional graph theoretic distance (such as
shortest path, maximum flow) is often not enough to describle the multiple-facet relationship
between two nodes.
7. What are the various layout algorithm?
Force-Directed Layout
Tree Layout
Random Layout
CS6010- SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Ms.A.DHIVYA BHARATHI AP/IT-MAMCE

REGULATION -2013

ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-2017

8. Give the significance of graph layout algorithm.

A drawing of a graph or network diagram is a pictorial representation of the vertices

and edges of a graph.

This drawing should not be confused with the graph itself: very different layouts can
correspond to the same graph.In the abstract, all that matters is which pairs of vertices
are connected by edges.

In the concrete, however, the arrangement of these vertices and edges within a drawing
affects its understandability, usability, fabrication cost, and aesthetics.

The problem gets worse, if the graph changes over time by adding and deleting edges
(dynamic graph drawing) and the goal is to preserve the user's mental map.
9. Write short notes on node-edge diagrams.
A node-edge diagram is an intuitive way to visualize social networks. With the nodeedge visualization, many network analysis tasks, such as component size calculation, centrality
analysis, and pattern sketching, can be better presented in a more straightforward manner.
Many node-edge layouts have been presented to place the nodes in the graph for users to
clearly recognize the structure of the social network.
10. List the three kinds of layouts.

random layout,

force-directed layout,

Tree layout
11. Illustrate random layouts with an example.
A random layout is to put the nodes at random geometric locations in the graph, and
thus it may not yield very clear visualization results, particularly when the number of nodes
immensely increases, e.g. more than thousands of nodes.
However, since a random layout algorithm can efficiently draw the social network graph
in linear time, O(N), sometimes it can be usable to visualize very large network graphs.
12. Explain tree layout with an example.
A basic tree layout is to choose a node as the root of tree, and the nodes connected to
the root become children of the root node. Nodes that are at more levels away from the root
become the grand-children of the root and so on. For a better visual presentation of domain
specific information, more suitable variants of the tree layout were proposed, such as
hyperbolic tree layout and a radial tree layout.
13. Mention the three kinds of tree layouts for social network visualization.
hyperbolic tree layout
radial tree layout.
H3 tree layout
14. Explain node-link diagrams.
The principle of node-link diagrams is to graphically represent actors of the network by
nodes and connections by links.
CS6010- SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Ms.A.DHIVYA BHARATHI AP/IT-MAMCE

REGULATION -2013

ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-2017

Node-link diagrams are the most commonly used representation of graphs and networks. It is
well illustrated by Freeman in his survey and history of social network visualization.
15. Write notes on property-based layouts.
Property-based Layouts. The simplest layout of a social network assigns the value of a node
property as a location in a coordinate system. This layout is simple to compute and helps
discover patterns in the distribution of that property along the network, but it may obscure its
global structure
16. Define Force-directed and Energy-based layouts.
A force-directed layout draws analogies from a physical structure of rods and springs
connecting spheres with the links and nodes in a network. Forces are designed to satisfy lowlevel properties that guarantee minimal overlap of nodes and proximity of related nodes.
17. What are the advantages and disadvantages of force-directed layouts?
Advantages:
Forces are designed to satisfy low-level properties that guarantee minimal overlap of
nodes and proximity of related nodes.
For example, attractive forces are often defined between any pair of connected nodes,
while repulsive forces are defined between all pairs of nodes.
The equilibrium state of such a system of forces results in the optimal placement of
nodes under that definition.
Disadvantages:
On one hand, they are expensive to compute, since the time to compute grows cubically
with the number of nodes in the network.
This makes them impractical even for simple real-life social networks, in the order of
only thousands of nodes.
On the other hand, maybe more critically, a force directed layout often results in a
hairball for most moderately sized networks, due to the power law distribution.
Brandes and Pich presented an experimental study that shows that multidimensional
scaling approaches to graph layout can satisfy aesthetic properties better than forcedirected placement
18. Write notes on spectral layouts.
This type of algorithms are based on spectral algebra on key matrices that can be
extracted from the social structure. It was shown that the eigenvectors of certain matrices can
be used as lower dimensional, typically2D, embeddings of the graph. The most widely
application of this technique uses the eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix. In other cases, the
eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix are used as the embedding coordinates
19. Write notes on matrix-oriented techniques.
social network graph consists of nodes connected with edges, it can be transformed into
a simple Boolean matrix whose rows and columns represent the vertices of the graph.
Moreover, the Boolean values in the matrix can be further replaced with valued
attributes associated with the edges to provide more informative network visualizations.

CS6010- SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Ms.A.DHIVYA BHARATHI AP/IT-MAMCE

REGULATION -2013

ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-2017

Since a matrix presentation can help minimize the occlusion problems caused by the
node-edge diagram, the matrix-based representation of graphs offers an alternative to
the traditional node-edge diagrams.

20. Give the benefits of matrix representation of social networks.

Matrices provide powerful overview visualization since the time to create them is low
and since they are always readable. They constitute a good representation to initiate an
exploration.
Matrices do not suffer from node overlapping, if the task requires to always read the
actors labels, this representation is more appropriate.
Matrices do not suffer from link crossing each other; therefore they are a viable
alternative for dense networks.
21. List the online social network visualizations based on different views of social
relationships.
Ontology-based Visualization.
Temporal Visualization
Statistical Visualization
22. Write short notes on Web Communities.
Since the start of SixDegrees.com, various social network websites and Web-based
dating services have been established to provide people more convenient ways to build
up their social relationships and communities.
In addition, many social network websites are developed with interactive visualization
interfaces to facilitate people connecting their communities and maintaining social
relationships.
23. What are digital libraries?
A digital library is a special library with a focused collection of digital objects that can
include text, visual material, audio material, video material, stored as electronic media
formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media), along with means for
organizing, storing, and retrieving the files and media contained in the library
collection.
Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by
individuals, organizations, or affiliated with established physical library buildings or
institutions, or with academic institutions.
The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks.
An electronic library is a type of information retrieval system.
24. What is a co-authorship network?
On the aspect of authors, co-authorships can be mined from the existing publications
and organize the co-authorship networks.With the visualization of co-authorships, some
characteristics, such as clustering coefficient and average path length, can be analyzed in coauthorship networks.
CS6010- SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Ms.A.DHIVYA BHARATHI AP/IT-MAMCE

REGULATION -2013

ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-2017

25. What are called Co-Citation Relations?

On contrary to the authorship view, social networks in digital libraries can be discovered
from the citations and co-citations among writings themselves.
Since references are a crucial part of a document for readers to obtain information source,
Co-citation social networks can be formed through the continuously accumulated publications.
26. What do you mean by Content-centric visualization?
As the boosted development and evolution of Internet applications, particularly in the era of
Web 2.0, an explosive amount of Web information was rapidly produced via various social
network communities.
Therefore, from the view of visualizing content-centric social relationships, various kinds of
contents can be properly presented to facilitate people analyzing social networks.
For example, at least the following three sorts of social network contents can displayed with
content-centric visualization:
27. What is the purpose of User-centric visualization?
From the perspective of actors, visualizing user-centric social relationships can present various
characteristics of actors and helps explore different subjects and relationships
of interests.
For example, visualizing user-centric social relationships can help people discover individuals
and communities that meet the following expectations:
1. actors or groups with similar/complementary features,
2. key actors or those with high social impacts, and
3. actors with popular interpersonal relationships or active social interactions.
28. What is meant by hybrid visualization?
Social activities among actors are generally more than one form and thus may consist of
different kinds of relationships and interactions.
Therefore, besides the user-centric visualization and content-centric visualization interfaces,
still many visualization interfaces are designed according to hybrid relationships.
Hybrid visualization is to visualize social networks from different aspects of attributes, e.g.
people and contents. Particularly, online social activities, such as email and dating
services, usually include such elements.
PART B
1. What is visualization? Explain Social Network visualization on the Web.
2. Discuss the taxonomy of visualizations of social networks.
3. Explain the following:
a. Clustering
b. Centrality
c. Node-link diagrams
4. Explain the Node-edge diagrams to visualize social networks.
5. Explain how to visualize social networks with matrix-based representation. Also discuss the pros
and cons of matrix-based representation.
6. Discuss the various approaches to scale node-link diagrams to large networks with several
thousand or millions of nodes.
CS6010- SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Ms.A.DHIVYA BHARATHI AP/IT-MAMCE

REGULATION -2013

ACADEMIC YEAR 2016-2017

7. Briefly explain the hybrid representation of visualization.

CS6010- SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

Ms.A.DHIVYA BHARATHI AP/IT-MAMCE