Social Networking Trends and Dynamics Detection via a Cloud-based Framework Design

Abstract

Social networking media generate huge content streams, which leverage, both academia and developers efforts in providing unbiased, powerful indications of users ’ opinion and interests. Here, we present Cloud4Trends, a framework for collecting and analyzing user generated content through microblogging and blogging applications, both separately and jointly, focused on certain geographical areas, towards the identification of the most significant topics using trend analysis techniques. The cloud computing paradigm appears to offer a significant benefit in order to make such applications viable considering that the massive data sizes produced daily impose the need of a scalable and powerful infrastructure. Cloud4Trends constitutes an efficient Cloud-based approach in order to solve the online trend tracking problem based on Web 2.0 sources. A detailed system architecture model is also proposed, which is largely based on a set of service modules developed within the VENUS-C research project to facilitate the deployment of research applications on Cloud infrastructures