Michael G. Noll

Applied Research. Big Data. Distributed Systems. Open Source.

Projects

Software

DeliciousAPI

Available at: http://www.michael-noll.com/projects/delicious-python-api/

This Python programming library provides an unofficial API for retrieving data from the social bookmarking service Delicious.com. For instance, it allows to retrieve the full history of a website’s bookmarking history (the official API does not provide such a feature). Personally, I have used DeliciousAPI for automated distributed crawling runs on Hadoop clusters to create large-scale experimental data sets for my research work on the Social Web and collaborative tagging, most notably SPEAR.

You can follow and contribute to the development of DeliciousAPI at our GitHub repository. If you just want to download the reference implementation, you can quickly install it through easy_install DeliciousAPI (you might have to use sudo easy_install DeliciousAPI on systems such as Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux).

Research

SPEAR Ranking Algorithm

Available at: http://www.michael-noll.com/projects/spear-algorithm/

Ching-man Au Yeung and I have developed the SPEAR ranking algorithm for ranking users in social networks by their expertise and influence within the community.

SPEAR Algorithm: Discoverers and Followers

Our work on SPEAR has been covered by international press and news media, including Technology Review and Communications of the ACM as well as the world’s top technology blogs such as ReadWriteWeb. We have been also very happy that Yahoo! invited us to write a featured article about SPEAR, considering that we used its social bookmarking service Delicious.com (which was owned by Yahoo back then) as data source for our scientific experiments.

For starters, you want to read my quick introduction on how to use the SPEAR Python library.