ViStruclizer: A structural visualizer for multi-dimensional social networks

Abstract

With the popularity of Web 2.0 sites, social networks today increasingly involve different kinds of relationships among different types of users in a single network. Such social networks are said to be multi-dimensional. Analyzing multi-dimensional networks is a challenging research task that requires intelligent visualization techniques. In this paper, we therefore propose a visual analytics tool called ViStruclizer to analyze structures embedded in a multi-dimensional social network. ViStruclizer incorporates structure analyzers that summarize social networks into both node clusters each representing a set of users, and edge clusters representing relationships between users in the node clusters. ViStruclizer supports user interactions to examine specific clusters of users and inter-cluster relationships, as well as to refine the learnt structural summary. © Springer-Verlag 2013.