OLAPing social media: The case of Twitter

Abstract

Social networks are platforms where millions of users interact frequently and share variety of digital content with each other. Users express their feelings and opinions on every topic of interest. These opinions carry import value for personal, academic and commercial applications, but the volume and the speed at which these are produced make it a challenging task for researchers and the underlying technologies to provide useful insights to such data. We attempt to extend the established OLAP(On-line Analytical Processing) technology to allow multidimensional analysis of social media data by integrating text and opinion mining methods into the data warehousing system and by exploiting various knowledge discovery techniques to deal with semi-structured and unstructured data from social media. The capabilities of OLAP are extended by semantic enrichment of the underlying dataset to discover new measures and dimensions for building data cubes and by supporting up-to-date analysis of the evolving as well as the historical social media data. The benefits of such an analysis platform are demonstrated by building a data warehouse for a social network of Twitter, dynamically enriching the underlying dataset and enabling multidimensional analysis.