Authors:
            
                    Andrei Eremeev
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Georgiy Korneev
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Alexander Semenov
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                     and
                
                    Jari Veijalainen
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliations:
            
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ITMO University, Russian Federation
                
                    ; 
                
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                    University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            Social Graph, Social Network Analysis, Shortest Path Problem, Odnoklassniki, the Atlas Algorithm.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Searching and Browsing
                    ; 
                        Social Media Analytics
                    ; 
                        Society, e-Business and e-Government
                    ; 
                        Web Information Systems and Technologies
                    ; 
                        Web Interfaces and Applications
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                Nowadays there are many social media sites with a very large number of users. Users of social media sites
and relationships between them can be modelled as a graph. Such graphs can be analysed using methods
from social network analysis (SNA). Many measures used in SNA rely on computation of shortest paths
between nodes of a graph. There are many shortest path algorithms, but the majority of them suits only for
small graphs, or work only with road network graphs that are fundamentally different from social graphs.
This paper describes an efficient shortest path searching algorithm suitable for large social graphs. The
described algorithm extends the Atlas algorithm. The proposed algorithm solves the shortest path problem
in social graphs modelling sites with over 100 million users with acceptable response time (50 ms per
query), memory usage (less than 15 GB of the primary memory) and applicable accuracy (higher than 90%
of the queries return exact result).