C-explorer: browsing communities in large graphs

• Published in: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 2017-08, Vol.10 (12), p.1885-1888
• Main Authors: Fang, Yixiang, Cheng, Reynold, Luo, Siqiang, Hu, Jiafeng, Huang, Kai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2150-8097; 2150-8097
• DOI: 10.14778/3137765.3137800

Community retrieval (CR) algorithms, which enable the extraction of subgraphs from large social networks (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), have attracted tremendous interest. Various CR solutions, such as k -core and codicil , have been proposed to obtain graphs whose vertices are closely related. In this paper, we propose the C-Explorer system to assist users in extracting, visualizing, and analyzing communities. C-Explorer provides online and interactive CR facilities, allowing a user to view her interesting graphs, indicate her required vertex q , and display the communities to which q belongs. A seminal feature of C-Explorer is that it uses an attributed graph , whose vertices are associated with labels and keywords, and looks for an attributed community (or AC), whose vertices are structurally and semantically related. Moreover, C-Explorer implements several state-of-the-art CR algorithms, as well as functions for analyzing their effectiveness. We plan to make C-Explorer an open-source web-based platform, and design API functions for software developers to test their CR algorithms in our system.