Formal Specification of Multi Agent System for Historical Information Retrieval from Online Social Networks

Abstract

Abstract. In the last few years, there has seen a marked increase in the usage of Online Social Networks (OSN). Coping with the real time changes of a huge amount of personal information requires new methods for retrieving information. Our previous approach for retrieving information from OSN was a centralized system that controlled and retrieved information of each user's profile once. In order to enhance that approach, a Multi Agent System (MAS) was chosen for its ability to deploy agents to monitor profiles continuously. Since MAS is difficult to implement correctly, a formal specification of an OSN System was constructed to help us investigate the feasibility of using MAS technology in retrieving historical information from OSN sites.

Automated Data Extraction from Online Social Network Profiles

“…An example is Facebook, which has done a lot of work into the issue of user privacy over the years. Third parties can only extract data from users' profiles by developing applications using their application programming interface (API) (Abdulrahman, Holton, Neagu, & Ridley, 2011). An API, as described by IBM (2005, p.1) is "a functional interface supplied by the operating system or a separately orderable licensed program that allows an application program written in a high-level language".…”

Formal Description of the Virtual Machines System Framework

“…The authors of [27] establish a formal fuzzy reasoning system and the associated semantics. Ruqayya Abdulrahman et al [28] construct a formal specification of an OSNRS to help us investigate the feasibility of using Multi Agent System technology in retrieving historical information from Online Social Networks sites.…”