This document discusses using social media data linked to open data to track public policy and services. It describes challenges in accessing social media data from different sources and formats. It then outlines the Linked2Media project and Social Media Linked Data Space, which develop platforms and models for semantically linking social media data. Next steps proposed are further integrating social and open data and using the combined data to influence, evaluate and justify public policy decisions.

1. Copyright 2011 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Utilising Linked Social Media Data for
Tracking Public Policy and Services
Deirdre Lee, Adegboyega Ojo, Mohammad Waqar
Open Data on the Web (ODW) 2013
24th April 2013 London, UK

2. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Influence
Justify
Evaluate
Relationship between OD and public
policy & services?
Public Policy
& Services
Open Data

3. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Influence
Justify
Evaluate
... and social media data?
Public Policy
& Services
Open Data
&
Social Media
Data

4. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Industry use of social media
Image source: http://blog.anametrix.com/15-marketing-analytics-statistics-2012/
Social-media
analytics to identify
trends, track
brands, predict
sales, etc.

5. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Government use of social media
Dissemination of
news, reporting on
events, promotion of
projects, some
citizen engagement

6. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Utilise social media data in the policy
making process
Extract
relevant data
Linked Data Analysis Trends, opinions,
ideas

7. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Challenges of accessing social-media
data
 A wide variety of data sources
 Various APIs to access the data (if there is an API)
 Unique constraints on how much data can be accessed, how often,
etc.
 Data returned in a variety of formats, e.g. JSON, XML, etc.
 Privacy limitations
 Social media data is noisy, informal, slang-filled, and thus, difficult to
process

8. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Linked2Media Project
Theme: Research for SME associations
 An open Linked Data platform for semantically interconnecting
online, social media, leveraging the corporate brand and market
sector reputation analysis and response optimisation services
http://www.linked2media.eu/

9. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Social Media Linked Data Space (SMLDS)
Triple Store
Monitoring-Activity
Controller
Opinion Modelling
and Extraction
Social Sharing and
Visualization
SMLDS
Data Enrichment Services
(NER, Interlinking)
Social-media
crawlers

10. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Limitations of social media APIs
Facebook Twitter Qype
Keyword Yes Yes
Yes – “Need Pro Account in some
cases”
Location No Yes Yes – By Country or Geo points
Language Yes- For posts only Yes Yes – For reviews only
Date
Yes- until and since
date
Yes – only until
date
Yes - Date of Creation
after/before
Results
Size
Yes (no official
limitation of the
number of results per
page) (up to 5000
results )
Yes – up to 10
pages and 100
results per page
(1 page = 1
request)
Pagination – 10 Results/Page
Limitations No official limitation
150 requests per
hour
200 Requests/Day

11. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
SMLDS Semantic Model
Short name Main area
SIOC
Social media contents: Forums, Weblog, Wikis,
Microblogs, etc.
schema.org Cross-domain including social media contents.
rNews News articles
rev Reviews and ratings
Marl Opinion and sentiment
FOAF People
Product ontology Products

12. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Enabling Networked Knowledge
Next Steps...
1. Integration of social media Linked Data with Open Data.
 (e.g. Kalampokis, PMOD 2012)
2. Utilisation of data to influence, justify and evaluate
public policy and services.
 (Interdisciplinary approach required)