Survey on Online Social Networks Analysis Concepts and Knowledge Discovery Techniques

In the recent decade, the Online Social Network (OSN) has gained remarkable attention. Accessing to OSN sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus; the most dominant social media in the world, through the internet and the web 2.0 technologies has become more comfortable. These days through these online social networks, it becomes very easy for anyone to meet the people of the same interests for learning and sharing precious information. Online Social Network Analysis (OSNA) is an essential and important technique to understand the social structure, social relationships and social behaviors of OSN. OSNA deals with the interaction between individuals by considering them as nodes of a network whereas their relations are mapped as network edges. Now, it has increased various challenges for the evolution of the web and simultaneously increased the dynamic changes in its structure so it became harder to manually analyze very broad OSN. This survey investigates the current progression in the field of knowledge discovery in OSNA and covers all basic techniques of Data, Text, and Web mining that are widely used for the exploration of the unstructured and structured data available on the OSNA. The targets for OSNA are mainly focused on resources