Visual Analysis for Online Communities Exploration Based on Social Data

As the result of Social media data being unprecedentedly available, we are provided so many substantial opportunities to explore social circle from many perspectives. Many researches have deep understandings of the correlation between social relation online and that on real world. These researches make conclusions from perspectives of statistics only but they cannot explain specific reasons underlying those conclusions. Obviously we can separate an individual’s social circle into several groups such as family group, classmate group and co-worker group etc. Aimed at labeling the friend groups online, in this paper, we implement a visual analytic system to exploring correlation between communities resulted from label propagation algorithm in online social friendship network of a centric user and each friend’s offline POI distribution of such places where the centric user has also visited. To demonstrate the reasonability and utility, we give 3 cases in details based on social media data of the online friendship and offline movement information provided by Tencent (the largest social service platform in China).