Publications

The use of graph databases has increased significantly in the last decades, especially for storing data in social networks (e.g. Facebook, Linkedin, etc.). An important question that has received considerable research is finding the group of spreaders or the influential nodes in a social network. These nodes are defined to be the set of nodes who collectively can reach all other nodes in the network diffusing and spreading information. These nodes can be used to drive the whole network to a certain opinion or idea, therefore finding these nodes can be of high interest to politicians and opinion makers and drivers. In this paper, we provide an algorithm that can identify the minimal set of spreaders in a database graph. The algorithm is based on first extracting the strongly connected components of the graph, and then using these to identify the set of bases of the directed graph. Each base can be used as the set of spreaders that will allow a piece of information to flow and reach all other users in the database.