Coalmine: an experience in building a system for social media analytics

Joshua S. White; Jeanna N. Matthews; John L. Stacy

doi:10.1117/12.918933

7 May 2012 Coalmine: an experience in building a system for social media analytics

Joshua S. White, Jeanna N. Matthews, John L. Stacy

Proceedings Volume 8408, Cyber Sensing 2012; 84080A (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.918933
Event: SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 2012, Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Abstract

Social media networks make up a large percentage of the content available on the Internet and most of the time users spend online today is in interacting with them. All of the seemingly small pieces of information added by billions of people result in a enormous rapidly changing dataset. Searching, correlating, and understanding billions of individual posts is a significant technical problem; even the data from a single site such as Twitter can be difficult to manage. In this paper, we present Coalmine a social network data-mining system. We describe the overall architecture of Coalmine including the capture, storage and search components. We also describe our experience with pulling 150-350 GB of Twitter data per day through their REST API. Specifically, we discuss our experience with the evolution of the Twitter data APIs from 2011 to 2012 and present strategies for maximizing the amount of data collected. Finally, we describe our experiences looking for evidence of botnet command and control channels and examining patterns of SPAM in the Twitter dataset.

Citation Download Citation

Joshua S. White, Jeanna N. Matthews, and John L. Stacy "Coalmine: an experience in building a system for social media analytics", Proc. SPIE 8408, Cyber Sensing 2012, 84080A (7 May 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.918933

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