Implementing Multiple-Social-Network Meta-APIs to Support OSINT Programming

Open source intelligence (OSINT) collects a set of approaches, methodologies, and tools, to make investigation about individuals on the basis of information publicly available over the Internet. For this important task, online social networks (OSN) represent nowadays the main source of information, so that large attention should be devoted to any approach that improves the capabilities of investigating over OSNs. The aim of this paper is to highlight that, despite the availability of tools and platforms for OSINT which also exploit OSNs, there is a gap in terms of software engineering perspective. Indeed, there is no a programming paradigm oriented to the abstract concept of online social network, independent of the specific instance of this concept. This resumes the multiple-social-network perspective in a software engineering key, and translates into the definition of a set of meta-APIs allowing the programmer to write generic and polymorphic code, naturally oriented to social-network investigation. This paper, born through the experience of an industrial project, shows the above claim by choosing some relevant fragments of the proposed framework.