Integrating social media data: Venues, groups and activities

Abstract

Social media has been fuelling necessary research in different areas, including the large-scale study of urban societies. Most research is done with a single source of information. Integrating data from multiple sources provides several benefits; for instance, we can have more information about the venues or groups in the city. However, the integration of different sources of social media is a complex task. A critical task in the interoperability between different social media platforms is to provide an integration link. We focus on location-based social network platforms and present solutions to integration based on physical venues, groups of users interacting with them, and activities performed in those venues. Besides, we also propose an ontology (Social Media Integration Ontology — SMIO) that provides a target data model into which data from multiple sources can be mapped with more precise, shared semantics. Our proposed approaches and ontology can help to enhance the variety of data that describes a venue or group and foster research into urban societies.