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Top1. Introduction
In recent years, cellular operators across the world have seen a rapid growth of mobile broadband subscribers. At the same time, social and different geolocation services for mobile platforms like iOS and Android are also increasing dynamically. In modern world people use their smartphones almost all the time and like to share information about their preferences, as well as their location with friends. Every year we see that the daily mobility of people increases very fast. People intersect with a lot of other people and acquaintances, not even knowing about it. And each person has a certain range of movements. At the same time, across a variety of social networks there is a problem of choice and discover of new acquaintances among people with the same interests and lifestyle.
The purpose of this research is algorithmization and automation of relationships identifying the process between different people or a group of people through the social search based on the users’ preferences and movements. In this work we will apply a two-step algorithm that generates recommendations and from the output we can get quite clear assessment of communication between various users. This algorithm includes:
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Analysis of data obtained through Facebook API, which includes details of the users’ preferences in different areas;
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Analysis of data obtained from users’ tracking, including collection of data about the places most visited by the user.
Scientific novelty of the work consists in the fact that our algorithm uses a multivariable analysis of data obtained from the social network and users movements. As a result, we obtain an estimate of similarity score of two users with high accuracy and containing a plurality of different parameters.
TopIn the article Facebook API is used to access users’ data and Goolge Places library to define the types of objects where user spends time. Both libraries are discussed below.
3.1. Facebook Graph API
The Facebook Graph API is the primary way to get data in and out of Facebook's platform. It's a low-level HTTP-based API that you can use to query data, post new stories, manage ads, upload photos and a variety of other tasks that an app might need to do. The Graph API is named after the idea of a 'social graph' - a representation of the information on Facebook composed of:
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Nodes: Basically “things” such as a User, a Photo, a Page, a Comment;
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Edges: The connections between those “things”, such as a Page's Photos, or a Photo's Comments;
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Fields: Info about those “things”, such as the User’s birthday, or the name of a Page.
The Graph API is HTTP based, so works with any language that has an HTTP library, such as cURL, urllib (Facebook Inc.). Graph API has SDK to work with iOS mobile operating system and allows to get large amounts of personal information about users posted on the Facebook social network. An example of the graph shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. An example of the social graph