Abstract
Big data analytics has recently emerged as an important research area due to the popularity of the Internet and the advent of the Web 2.0 technologies. Moreover, the proliferation and adoption of social media applications have provided extensive opportunities and challenges for researchers and practitioners. The massive amount of data generated by users using social media platforms is the result of the integration of their background details and daily activities. This enormous volume of generated data known as “big data” has been intensively researched recently. A review of the recent works is presented to obtain a broad perspective of the social media big data analytics research topic. We classify the literature based on important aspects. This study also compares possible big data analytics techniques and their quality attributes. Moreover, we provide a discussion on the applications of social media big data analytics by highlighting the state-of-the-art techniques, methods, and the quality attributes of various studies. Open research challenges in big data analytics are described as well.
1.0 Introduction
The popularity of the Internet and the advent of the Web 2.0 technologies have transformed the contents of the web from publisher- to user-created contents (Alexander, 2006). Such existence has assisted in publishing contents without the needs of programming. Today, interesting topics, reviews, and opinions from Web 2.0 and social media can easily be accessible globally via the Internet in real time. Moreover, the proliferation and adoption of social media have provided extensive opportunities and challenges for researchers and practitioners. More than a billion of people around the world are using social media platforms that generate overwhelming unstructured data in relatively short timescales. The huge amount of data generated by users is the result of the integration of their background details and daily activities in such platform. This massive amount of generated data referred to as “big data” has been intensively researched recently.
6.0 Conclusion
Big social media data along with the progress in computational tools have emerged as the key to crucial insights into human behavior and are continually stored and processed by corporations, individuals, and governments. Frist, we investigate the recent work on big social media analytics and provide a broad perspective of the area. Second, we classify the literature based on important aspects, such as data sources, characteristics, computational intelligence, and techniques. Third, we compare possible big data analytics techniques and their quality attributes. Fourth, we identify the opportunities with respect to big data analytics on social media. Finaly, we describe the open research challenges in big data analytics.
