Facebook Application to Extract Data for Data Mining

Posted: February 25th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Facebook, Research Work | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

After couple of stabs at facebook-java-api, I was able to build my frist facebook application which happened to be the first stage of developing a app to extract data from facebook for my Data Mining research. At Facebook has three types of RestClients that you can invoke to do your development. And in my case I use FacebookXMLRestClient.

At some point I will write a tutorial type blog post on building a facebook application, but for now I will have the screen shots. I have a feeling going forward I will run into an issue because, my intention is to populate the data model while I am extracting data. Since this is web approach I have to use Hibernate to get the database populate. For research project like this where I want to spend more time on developing our mining concepts rather than ORM technologies is not the best place to experiment my hibernate skills. So at somepoint I have to figure out away to make this as a desktop application and use regular JDBC connection to do data population.

As of now the application I wrote login and extract all the IDs of my Facebook friends, and the next step would be to iterate over each of my friend user id and get their friends.

Facebook Data Extraction

Facebook Data Extraction

Here is the snapshot of the code, at very soon I will be hosting this project as a Google Code Project and will put the link out.

Looks like I will be more involve with the facebook-java-api team, so far I think we need more documentation on java api. Also I dont know why Facebook decided to stop supporting facebook java api.


2 Comments on “Facebook Application to Extract Data for Data Mining”

  1. avatar
    1 charles said at 1:30 am on July 23rd, 2011:

    what are the chances of a step by step guide for fb data mining for dummies?

  2. avatar
    2 Anuradha Uduwage said at 5:45 am on July 23rd, 2011:

    It really depends on what you want to do. You need to figure exactly what you want to mine out of Facebook data. When I did this project Facebook didn’t have Facebook Graph API, So I would recommend start reading on Facebook API. The time I did they didn’t have Facebook Graph API and I used facebook Java API which is not maintained by Facebook.


Leave a Reply

  • or, connect with
Get Adobe Flash player