I spent this week charting out ER diagrams for a Facebook database schema. A lot of this work involved converting DDL statements I found online into a class diagram, and understanding how the classes related to each other. I am now at a point where I understand the entities and their relationships, and the next step is figuring out which of these entities I care about for my project.

I have also been using Mining The Social Web. This book is an overview of data mining popular websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and (interestingly as a social media site), LinkedIn. It even touches on the semantic web and the not-so-popular Google Buzz. Each area is covered with explanations on how to set up programs, a brief introduction to and explanation on the workings of the API, some examples of mining code and a couple of suggestions on how to use it.

I plan to use the data I am learning to harvest through these APIs to test and iteratively hone my data model. I’m currently working on charting out the ER diagram for Twitter, although this is proving trickier than it’s Facebook counterparts because I’ve only been able to find fragments of the model in different places.