B.

Tech Information Technology

CS6010 -Social Networks Analysis
UNIT 2-QUESTION BANK
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)
nD/Multidimensional Tree/Hierarchical
Network

3D/Volumetric

Temporal

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?
1. Ontology-based Visualization.
2. 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. List the high level properties that a layout must satisfy.
7. 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.
8. How readability is achieved in representative layout?
9. What are the various layout algorithm?
Force-Directed Layout
Tree Layout
Random Layout
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10. 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.
11. Write short notes on node-edge diagrams.
A node-edge diagram is an intuitive way to visualize social networks. With the node-edge
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.
12. List the three kinds of layouts.
random layout, force-directed layout, and tree layout, are described to explain the node-edge
diagrams.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. Mention the three kinds of tree layouts for social network visualization.
hyperbolic tree layout
radial tree layout.
H3 tree layout
16. Explain node-link diagrams.
The principle of node-link diagrams is to graphically represent actors of the network by nodes
and connections by links.
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.
17. 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

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discover patterns in the distribution of that property along the network, but it may obscure its
global structure
18. 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. For
example, attractive forces are often dened between any pair of connected nodes, while
repulsive forces are dened between all pairs of nodes. The equilibrium state of such a system
of forces results in the optimal placement of nodes under that definition.
19. 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 dened between any pair
of connected nodes, while repulsive forces are dened 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 force-directed placement
20. 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
21. Write notes on matrix-oriented techniques.
Since a 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.
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 nodeedge diagrams.
22. 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.
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23. List the online social network visualizations based on different views of social
relationships.
Ontology-based Visualization.
Temporal Visualization
Statistical Visualization
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. 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 co-authorship networks.
27. 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.
28. 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:
29. 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
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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.
30. 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.
7. Briefly explain the hybrid representation of visualization.
8. Briefly explain the concept of modeling and aggregating social network data.
9. Explain how clustering is performed with random walk based measures. Also discuss the
algorithms for computing proximity measures.
10. a) Discuss the applications of random walks approach.
b) Briefly explain the use of Hadoop and Map Reduce.

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