This book focuses on data and how modern business firms use social data,
specifically Online Social Networks (OSNs) incorporated as part of the
infrastructure for a number of emerging applications such as
personalized recommendation systems, opinion analysis, expertise
retrieval, and computational advertising. This book identifies how in
such applications, social data offers a plethora of benefits to enhance
the decision making process.
This book highlights that business intelligence applications are more
focused on structured data; however, in order to understand and analyse
the social big data, there is a need to aggregate data from various
sources and to present it in a plausible format. Big Social Data (BSD)
exhibit all the typical properties of big data: wide physical
distribution, diversity of formats, non-standard data models,
independently-managed and heterogeneous semantics but even further
valuable with marketing opportunities.
The book provides a review of the current state-of-the-art approaches
for big social data analytics as well as to present dissimilar methods
to infer value from social data. The book further examines several areas
of research that benefits from the propagation of the social data. In
particular, the book presents various technical approaches that produce
data analytics capable of handling big data features and effective in
filtering out unsolicited data and inferring a value. These approaches
comprise advanced technical solutions able to capture huge amounts of
generated data, scrutinise the collected data to eliminate unwanted
data, measure the quality of the inferred data, and transform the
amended data for further data analysis. Furthermore, the book presents
solutions to derive knowledge and sentiments from BSD and to provide
social data classification and prediction. The approaches in this book
also incorporate several technologies such as semantic discovery,
sentiment analysis, affective computing and machine learning.
This book has additional special feature enriched with numerous
illustrations such as tables, graphs and charts incorporating advanced
visualisation tools in accessible an attractive display.
