A Platform for Real-Time Opinion Mining from Social Media and News Streams

Big data is a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured. It can best be defined by thinking of three Vs: Big data is not just about Volume, but also about Velocity and Variety. The demand for stream processing is increasing a lot these days. The reason is that often processing big volumes of data is not enough. The increasing amount of opinionated data that is published in social media, in combination with the variety of data sources has created a demanding ecosystem for stream processing. The reason is that in order to deliver high quality knowledge extraction services, several tasks of high complexity must be accomplished and the existing solutions and architectures are not sufficient for processing huge volumes of streamed data. When opinion mining is applied in social media in order to cover the needs of businesses for brand monitoring, heterogeneous data has to be processed fast, so that a firm can react to changing business conditions in real time.

I. Introduction

The growing enthusiasm for social media, created a new channel for companies that want to advertise their products and services, or simply want to boost and monitor their brand name. This resulted to large amounts of data, which are created daily to various social media and the news and contain mentions to products and companies.