Most of the information that we include for each node and edge is straightforward to obtain from the Twitter stream. However, there are some data processing aspects that require special handling: Mapping user names to IDs: The Twitter stream relates the tweets with internal user identifiers, while user mentions are expressed as user names. To match them, we use the Twitter API to resolve the user-id and user-name reference. URL shortening: A tweet is constrained to 140 characters, so most URLs are shortened using a URL shortening service such as http: //. The problem here is that a single URL can be referred to as several different short URLs. We.
