Social network analysis: Tasks and tools

Abstract

Social network analysis can provide great insights into systems composed of interacting objects, and have been successfully applied to various domains. With many different ways to analyze social networks, no single tool currently supports all analysis tasks, but some incorporate more functionality than others. Moreover, the emergence of a new class of social network analysis techniques, link mining, presents a new range of analysis support to provide by the tools. This paper introduces representative social network analysis tasks from traditional, link mining, and visualization aspects, and evaluates a set of tools with diverse general characteristics and social network analysis functionality.