Facebook Application to Extract Data for Data Mining

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

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.

Pulling my hair out on FB Data Extraction

I am trying it put together java base data extraction module for Facebook data. I am doing this to get large enough data set for my data mining project. I am thankful for all the developers who are trying to keep up the java-facebook-api upto date, but I had enormous amount of issues with facebook-java-api. Including my other research work this is the latest enemy of sleep. So, to give you an idea, for the last four days my total number of sleep hours are in single digit.