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SQL or NoSQL? Contrasting Approaches to the Storage, Manipulation and Analysis of Spatio-temporal Online Social Network Data

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Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2014 (ICCSA 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8579))

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Abstract

Researchers are now accessing millions of Online Social Network (OSN) interactions. These are available at no or low cost through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or data custodians including DataSift and GNIP. Records held in Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) are well structured but often inconveniently formatted for use in popular Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. In contrast, emerging NoSQL (Not-only Structured Query Language) technologies are specially designed to ‘ingest’ unstructured data. Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) procedures for the storage and subsequent analysis of two OSN datasets in SQL/NoSQL databases are examined. The fixed data model of the relational approach may prove problematic when loading unpredictable document-based structures arising from extended periods of data collection. Although relational databases are far from obsolete the spatial analysis community seems likely to benefit from experimentation with new software explicitly designed for handling spatio-temporal Big Data.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom

    Adrian Tear

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  1. Adrian Tear
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, University of Basilicata, 85100, Potenza, Italy

    Beniamino Murgante

  2. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria

    Sanjay Misra

  3. Department of Production and Systems, University of Minho, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal

    Ana Maria A. C. Rocha

  4. DICAR, Polytecnico di Bari, 70125, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Torre

  5. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Jorge Gustavo Rocha  & Maria Irene Falcão  & 

  6. Monash University, 3800, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    David Taniar

  7. Department of Intelligent Informatics, Kyushu Sangyo University, 2-3-1 Matsukadai, 813-8503, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, Japan

    Bernady O. Apduhan

  8. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Perugia, Via Vanvitelli, 1, 06123, Perugia, Italy

    Osvaldo Gervasi

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Tear, A. (2014). SQL or NoSQL? Contrasting Approaches to the Storage, Manipulation and Analysis of Spatio-temporal Online Social Network Data. In: Murgante, B., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2014. ICCSA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8579. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09144-0_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09144-0_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09144-0

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