Crawling Social Internetworking Systems

In new generation social networks, we expect that the paradigm of Social Internetworking Systems (SISs, for short) will be more and more important. Indeed, the possibility of interconnecting users and resources which belong to different social networks, enables a lot of strategic applications, whose main strength will be the integration of possibly different communities yet preserving their diversity and autonomy. In this new scenario, the role of Social Network Analysis is of course still crucial in studying the evolution of structures, individuals, interactions, and so on, and in extracting powerful knowledge from them. But the preliminary step to do is designing a good way to crawl the underlying graph. While this aspect has been deeply investigated in the field of social networks, it is an open issue when moving towards SISs. Indeed, we cannot expect that a crawling strategy which is good for social networks, is still valid in a Social Internetworking Scenario, due to its specific topological features. In this paper, we confirm the above claim, giving thus a strong motivation for our second contribution, which is the definition of a new crawling strategy. This strategy, specifically conceived for SISs, is shown to fully overcome the drawbacks of the state-of-the-art crawling strategies.