Once the database was loaded, a small Java program was written to extract the information required to generate the node data and tie data required. This application provides some important functionality for this study that allows us to:
• Generate the message frequency matrix
• Calculate the contribution index (Gloor et al., 2003)
• Calculate the External- Internal Index (Krackhardt et al., 1988)
• Calculate the Content Richness Score
• Calculate Average Tie Strength
• Generate Node and Tie data