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As the title says: What does "Graph" mean in this context? And why is it named "Graph"?

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3 Answers 3

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Graph is used here in mathematical context. The Wikipedia article could be helpful. Copying from the documentation:

The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).

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kgiannakakis: So the name "graph" is used because it means this: "... a set of objects where some pairs of the objects are connected by links"? –  LuckyLuke Aug 3 '11 at 9:12
I doubt that the facebook graph strictly conforms to the definition of a mathematical graph, but this is where the name came from. See the quoted text in my edited answer. –  kgiannakakis Aug 3 '11 at 9:41
According to the text you quoted, they are real graphs, multi partite graphs to be precise. –  Snicolas Aug 3 '11 at 16:41

Graph in general is a mathematical term of a SET of nodes.

This is my own definition:

A set of nodes is a graph if there exists some notion of edge between nodes.

A tree is a graph

In facebook, nodes could be a facebook user, a facebook page, a place, a group, or any other entity.

An edge is simply a relation between nodes.

For example:

  1. A facebook user can be a friend of another facebook user.
  2. A facebook user can belong to a group
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As @kgiannakakis explained a graph is a mathematical structure. Bascially like a tree but without a single root. (trees are graphs).

In Facebook, I guess nodes are "friends" and edges are "their relations".

Regards, Stéphane

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