My Honours Project was developed to try and find out trends and information about publicly available Social Bookmarking data. Below is a quick explanation on how this was gathered:
- Data extracted from Social Bookmarking website via an XML feed (I chose Delicious.com).
- This data was then cleaned so that only the raw data was left.
- Raw ‘pure’ data was stored in a database.
- Algorithms were ran on this data, such as for Duplicates (to show popularity), Character Lengths, and comparing the Tags used by users to that of English Dictionary words.
- These statistics were stored in the database and used to generate page content including Graphs, Charts and Tables.
PHP was used extensively to extract, process and write data from Delicious.com to a MYSQL database back-end. XML results were created and fed into a freeware PHP/Flash package that generated customisable charts and graphs (http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/).
