The Stu­dents’ Por­tal of Il­me­nau: A Holis­tic OSN’s User Be­haviour Model

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become an essential part of the social life for more than one billion people. OSNs have received a considerable attention from different research communities. OSN providers, however, rarely share their data in order to protect both their business secrets as well as the privacy of their users. Data access limitations have forced researchers, in order to study several user behaviour aspects, to use data collected from different and inconsistent datasets. Correlating different datasets, however, is impossible or hard to validate. In this paper, we provide a holistic analysis of user behaviour in OSNs using the Students’ Portal of Ilmenau as a case study. Our analysis is based on a log-file level dataset, providing insights into the observed churn, usage patterns as well as social graph properties.