SoQL: A Language for Querying and Creating Data in Social Networks

We present SoQL (SOcial networks Query Language), a new language for querying and creating data in social networks. The language is designed to meet the growing need of social networks participants to efficiently manage the large, and quickly growing, amounts of data available to them, as well as automate processes of creating new data. This need is increasingly pressing as social networks gradually become an important working tool for business development and management. SoQL is a step in the direction of meeting the challenges of providing an expressive querying mechanism and automating processes in social networks. SoQL is an SQL-like language which enables the user to retrieve paths to other participants in the network, and use a retrieved path in order to attempt to create a connection with the participant at the end of the path. The language can specify complex conditions that a desired path should satisfy. The language also supports retrieving a group of participants which satisfy conditions as a group, and connecting its members to each other. SoQL uses the path and group as data types. This work presents the SoQL language and discusses implementation issues.