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.

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.

Synonymy & polysemy of natural languages together with information overload are two main factors that affect the relevance of Web hits. When users submit a query, search engines usually return a long list of hits with syntactic similarity. Users are confronted with choosing a needle from a haystack - relevant items from long lists of hits. This book proposes an improved strategy for increasing the relevance of Web search results via search term disambiguation and ontological filtering. Results are classified into an ontology, such as Open Directory Project. Semantic characteristics of ontology categories are represented by a category-document and similarities of this and search results are evaluated using a Vector Space Model. Users choose a category to obtain only the search results classified under the selected category. Experimental data show the approach boosts the Web hits precision by more than 20%. The book should help shed some light on Web searching and word sense disambiguation, and should be useful to students and researchers in the fields of information retrieval, text classification, and data mining; or anyone else interested in Web searching.