A series of case studies to enhance the social
utility of RSS
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Abstract
RSS (really simple syndication, rich site summary or RDF site summary) is a dialect of
XML that provides a method of syndicating on-line content, where postings consist of
frequently updated news items, blog entries and multimedia. RSS feeds, produced by
organisations or individuals, are often aggregated, and delivered to users for consumption
via readers. The semi-structured format of RSS also allows the delivery/exchange of
machine-readable content between different platforms and systems.
Articles on web pages frequently include icons that represent social media services
which facilitate social data. Amongst these, RSS feeds deliver data which is typically
presented in the journalistic style of headline, story and snapshot(s). Consequently, applications
and academic research have employed RSS on this basis. Therefore, within the
context of social media, the question arises: can the social function, i.e. utility, of RSS be
enhanced by producing from it data which is actionable and effective?
This thesis is based upon the hypothesis that the
fluctuations in the keyword frequencies
present in RSS can be mined to produce actionable and effective data, to enhance
the technology's social utility. To this end, we present a series of laboratory-based case
studies which demonstrate two novel and logically consistent RSS-mining paradigms. Our first paradigm allows users to define mining rules to mine data from feeds. The second
paradigm employs a semi-automated classification of feeds and correlates this with sentiment.
We visualise the outputs produced by the case studies for these paradigms, where
they can benefit users in real-world scenarios, varying from statistics and trend analysis
to mining financial and sporting data.
The contributions of this thesis to web engineering and text mining are the demonstration
of the proof of concept of our paradigms, through the integration of an array of
open-source, third-party products into a coherent and innovative, alpha-version prototype
software implemented in a Java JSP/servlet-based web application architecture