Looks at the emerging use of social big data government, enabling infrastructure and challenges to be addressed.

1. Opportunities and Challenges in
Harnessing Social Big Data in
Government
Adegboyega Ojo, Insight Centre for Data Analytics
National University of Ireland, Galway
adegboyega.ojo@insight-centre.org
Big Data in Public Administration Panel, dg.o 2014, Auguscalientes, Mexico
19 June 2014

2. Agenda
The talk will touch on:
o Social Big Data (SBD) in Government
o Social Big Data Infrastructure by Insight @ NUI Galway
o Challenges to SBD adoption in Government
o Conclusion
18 June 2014

3. Social Big Data (1)
Big data is any data:
• too big to process with current tools – Volume
• arriving too fast for optimal storage and indexing - Velocity
• too heterogeneous to fit into a rigid schema - Variety
o Volume usually in magnitude of PetaByte (1015) or ExaByte (1018)
o Velocity implies the need for tools to monitor, analyse and
manage real-time streaming data
o Variety connotes the mixture of structured and unstructured
information of different formats including text, video, audio,
images, databases, etc.
Big data is also exhaustive as it often captures data representing a
whole population rather than samples and fine grained in resolution.
The Challenge is how to generate valuable insights from these data.
18 June 2014

4. Social Big Data (2)
Social Big Data is Big Data generated from user contributed data
such as posts, comments, and user interactions across social media
websites such as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
They are generated as real-time data streams from diverse sources
on the social web.
18 June 2014
www.xposedmediaworld.com www.athgo.org

5. Social Big Data - Monitoring & Analytics
There is more than 400* social media monitoring tools in the
market. Main features are as follow:
• Summarizing, reporting and data visualization
• Multilingual search and text analytics for entity extraction,
name matching, name translation, government intelligence, e-
discovery and financial compliance
• Sentiment detection and analysis
• Event detection and analysis
• Citizen and customer engagement and management
Examples - HootSuite, BlitzMetrics, Brandwatch, CARMA, IBM’s
jStart, Social Mention etc.
18 June 2014
* http://www.pamorama.net/2013/05/12/50-top-tools-for-social-media-monitoring-
social-media-analytics-social-media-management-2013/

6. Social Big Data - Monitoring & Analytics:
Example - Social Mention
18 June 2014

7. Social Big Data in Government – Example 1
The federal government is seeking a firm that "continuously
monitors social media content on a daily basis in near real time and
(can) provide web-based, online media metrics and reporting
capabilities”.
Part of the job will be to gauge the sentiment and tone of posts and
to determine their reach.
Project will run until January 2019.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/29/social_media_to
_be_monitored_by_federal_government.html
18 June 2014

8. Social Big Data in Government – Example 2
The Food and Drug Administration has ordered the social media
monitoring tool to help FDA’s Office of External Affairs (OEA) better
understand its audience and gauge the effectiveness of its activities
and outreach campaigns.
The tool will generate metrics to help better monitor the success
and failure of tweets and status updates in various social media
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
The metric should be, but is not limited to: engagement, sentiment,
likes, follows, and mentions.
18 June 2014
http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2013/sep/25/us-agency-implement-social-media-monitoring-tool/

9. Social Big Data in Government – Example 3
Livehoods is a research project from the
School of Computer Science at Carnegie
Mellon University.
Presents a new approach for studying the
dynamics, structure, and character of a
city on a large scale using social media and
machine learning.
Using data such as tweets and check-ins, it
is able to discover the hidden structures of
the city with machine learning.
18 June 2014
http://livehoods.org/

10. Social Big Data in Government – Example 4
o Egyptian Government plans to develop a new Social Media Monitoring
System at a scale similar to the NSA PRISM program.
o The government will build services to scan social media site like
Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter in real-time for keywords that are
“contrary to law and public morality,” or contain calls to protest or
strike.
o The system will also search for and flag any dissent against the
government and identify individuals who help the public form
opinions that are contrary to law.
18 June 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/02/egypt-police-monitor-social-media-dissent-facebook-twitter-protest

11. Social Big Data Infrastructure (1)
Open sourced, flexible and available architecture for large scale
computation and data processing on a network of commodity
hardware.
18 June 2014

12. Social Big Data Infrastructure –
Super Stream Collider by Insight@NUIG
18 June 2014
superstreamcollider.org for demo

13. Social Big Data Infrastructure –
Social Media Linked Dataspace by Insight 1
Leveraging Linked Data Platform for Semantically-Interconnecting
Online, Social Media for Corporate Brand and Market Sector
Reputation Analysis
18 June 2014
http://linked2media.eu/

14. Social Big Data Infrastructure –
Social Media Linked Dataspace by Insight 2
18 June 2014

15. Social Big Data Infrastructure –
Language Resources for Government Domain
18 June 2014
Islam Hassan and Adegboyega Ojo,
Enabling GOV3.0 through Semantic
Web, Natural Language Processing
and Text Analytics, Transforming
Government (t-Gov) 2014
Workshop, June 12-13, 2014
Requires
collaborating with
different groups:
NLP, Information
Mining, Sensor
Middleware, Social
Software units and
Reasoning and
querying units.

16. Social Big Data Adoption in Government
Issues and Challenges
18 June 2014
o Developing Social Big Data adoption roadmap
o Evolving Enterprise Data Management? Infrastructure to
accommodate unstructured and semi-structured data, from data
sources such as social media?
o Identifying criteria for selecting social big data solutions that
meets business and IT needs?
o Identifying data governance aspects (e.g. quality, usability,
security, etc.) to be considered when implementing or sourcing
Social Big Data solutions?
o Ensuring that decisions informed by insights generated are
implemented
o How can Social Media Monitoring and Big Data service provider
support agencies in implementing their Social Big Data programs?
http://www.infosys.com/bigdataedge/resources/Documents/7-key-considerations.pdf

17. Conclusion
Social Big Data is a relatively new phenomenon in government as
shown in examples. Established experiences are few.
Experiences and solutions from private sector may be useful in
designing solutions in government, noting difference in contexts
Social Big Data capabilities (technical, organizational and financial)
has to be developed in government while simultaneously engaging
the services of SBD, Big Data and Cloud service providers.
All the above requires (Social) Big Data and Cloud Computing
adoption policies in government.
18 June 2014