Social media, data integration, and human computation
AnHai Doan · 2012
Social media has emerged as a major frontier on the World-Wide Web, with applications ranging from helping teenagers track Justin Bieber to e-commerce to fostering revolutions. In this talk I will discuss our work in this area, as carried out at Wisconsin, Kosmix, and @WalmartLabs. I describe how we integrate data from "traditional" Web sources to build a global taxonomy, greatly expand it with social-media data, then leverage it to build consumer-facing applications. Example applications include building topic pages, detecting Twitter events, and monitoring these events. I discuss the critical role of data integration and human computation in processing social media. Finally, I discuss how all of these can help the emerging area of social commerce, and why Walmart recently acquired Kosmix to make inroads into this new and exciting area.