Social networking sites represent a novel and valuable source of information. Increasing amounts of data on public events, points of interest, and urban sensing are available online. An unexpected explosion of user-generated content or information is available on social networks. An increase in the number of registered users increases the scope of industrial and academic research on social networks for different goals, including marketing, workload characterization, understanding and forecasting Internet use, and identifying the main challenges to support future Internet-based services.

One can gather a possible amount of information or content from social networks that may be useful for different situations, from marketing to intelligence. Unfortunately, the main challenge is collecting data or information from social networks with respect to other Internet-based sources. This might differ depending on the size and the complexity of a social network.

Extracting data...