| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 資訊科學學系 === 103 === Recently Facebook has become an indispensable platform for many people to record their lives and to concern their friends. Many Humanities and Social Sciences scholars are interested in conducting research on the activity records of the Facebook users, such as check-ins and shared story. Therefore, there is a large demand in collecting these user activity records while respecting user privacy. Based on the open API (Application Programming Interface) by Facebook, we design and implement a “Facebook User Activities Data Collector” to help scholars collect the activity records with the permission from Facebook users. Using the collector, researchers can create projects for Facebook data retrieval and solicit volunteers to participate those projects by giving their permissions to enable the collector to retrieve their activity records following the Facebook privacy rules.
Our tool offers a friendly user interface for researchers and participating users. Besides, as a user may participate in multiple data retrieval projects in the same period of time, our collector is equipped with an “account aggregation” mechanism that will retrieve all the records of a user for the projects he participated at once without repetitive collection work that will degrade the performance of the tool. Another feature of the collector is a robust exception handling mechanism that will handle frequent occurring exceptions in data retrieval and reports unknown exceptions to system administrators to improve the system’s reliability. To verify our collector, we have also recruited several volunteers and conducted some experiments to retrieve their activity records. The preliminary results show that our collector performs well and collects the records correctly.
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