BEAR
Table of Contents
Indroduction
BEAR is a programming language focused on Social Network Analysis. Social Network Analysis (SNA for short) is, in its basic form, a type of study of human interaction. This type of analysis has gained momentum in the past decade with the rising popularity of Social Media Platforms. Thus, it has been cited as playing an important role in modern society. With this overwhelming need of a medium that allows an easy way of collecting, analyzing and creating graphs in this society is that BEAR was born.
The abbreviation BEAR stands for the following: Bárbara, Enrique, Alberto, Raúl; These are the member of the BEAR development team. By suggestion of Prof. Wilson Rivera, the group took to SNA functionality in developing their language. Nowadays, companies, business, politicians and movements make their presence known in social media. With it, they can reach a vast number of users. And, in order to impact those they want to target, they often use SNA to figure out the appropriate way to do so. Curiously, SNA can be applied to various domain applications like history, biology, anthropology and behavioral science.
In the overall scope of Social Network Analysis, there are two important aspects to evaluate: the general structure of a network (also known as socio-centered perspective), and the composition of local network structures (known as the ego-centered perspective). Both aspects contain key information on any given social group, such as the group’s cohesiveness and ability to communicate and exchange with other social groups. Inside of each social group or network, individuals may be found (known as actors). This allows for the potential of studying general human interaction, locating and examining epidemics and evaluating historical events.
Recapitulating, BEAR is focused on social network analysis that hopes to facilitate the way users analyze data for a variety of reasons and be able to display it in different types of graphs. Through it, we can gain a better understanding of how humans interact with each other through different mediums and how such interactions impact society.
Project Demo
Language features
Oleksandr Kaleniuk says:
“…the distinct feature of 21st-century language design is the absence of any distinct features in the languages themselves.” “They don’t have anything new in them at all; they are all made by the “something done right” formula, this something being Objective-C, Java or C.”
After reading Kaleniuk’s article, we can only nod in agreement.
BEAR is a purely interpreted language. It’s Scanner and Parser are implemented with PLY, and it uses the Open-Source graph library NetworkX. The Language Definiton can be accessed here.
Our approach to BEAR follows the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) design philosophy. As such, no for loops or conditionals are implemented. Everything can and should be written in one line. For a list of commands, type ‘help’ in the BEAR interpreter.
Final Report
The final report can be found on the visiting the following link: Click Here