Modeling and OLAPing social media: the case of Twitter

Abstract

In the recent year, social networks have revolutionized the ways of interacting and exchanging information on the Internet. Millions of users interact frequently and share variety of digital content with each other. They 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 into such data. We attempt to extend the established online analytical processing (OLAP) technology to allow multidimensional analysis of social media data. In this paper, we pursue a goal of providing a generic multidimensional model dedicated to the OLAP of social media and specially Twitter. The proposed model reflects on some specifics such as recursive references between tweets, Empty dimension, and different types of hierarchies. It is implemented using NetBeans IDE platform. We present also some experimental results. We expect our proposed approach to be applicable for analyzing the data of other social networks as well.

News Dissemination on Twitter and Conventional News Channels

“…Hence, this application is useful in understanding the relation between various countries and how an event occurring in a country affects another country. Other data forms could also be useful for analysis purposes such as OLAP-based modelling (Kraiem et al, 2015).…”

OLAP operators for social network analysis

“…Figure 1 depicts the extended multidimensional model for tweets. For further details on the Tweet Constellation model, refer to [1].…”

“…In this paper, we have projected the use of conventional data warehouse systems, used in many businesses, over the data issued from social media by enabling them to store, model, operate, and consume such data. In previous work, we have proposed a multidimensional model dedicated to the OLAP of data exchanged through tweets [1]. This model takes into account the specificities of data issued from tweets.…”

BigDimETL: ETL for Multidimensional Big Data

“…The multidimensional structure is described in a metadata XML file, including the global structure of the DW which should be given in the beginning. Figure 2 shows a part from our XML file which describes the star schema of Tweets [12]. This file will be saved as a file system in HDFS (Hadoop Data File System), in order to be accessible during ETL steps.…”