The study on social networks has its origins in social, educational and business communities. Academic interest in this field has been growing since the mid 20th century. The recent increase in the number of Web users stimulates the interaction among people, data dissemination and exchange of information, and also increases significantly the available data, provided by people, their interaction, logs and web servers. With big data sets the analysis can be more accurate and brings also the opportunity to evaluate and develop new techniques for social network analysis and data identification and mining. This has raised the interest of a wide range of fields - such as academia, politics, security, business, marketing, science - on social network analysis. This special issue includes extended and revised versions of a set of selected papers from BraSNAM 2016 (the fifth Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining), held together with the 36th Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira de Computação (CSBC) which is the official event of the Brazilian Computing Society. The goal of the meeting is to provide a valuable opportunity for multidisciplinary groups to meet and engage in discussions on social network analysis.
Edited by: Jonice de Oliveira Sampaio and Giseli Rabello Lopes