Social Computing Data Repository

Social Computing Data Repository hosts data from a collection of many different social media sites, most of which have blogging capacity. Some of the prominent social media sites included in this repository are BlogCatalog, Twitter, MyBlogLog, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, MySpace, LiveJournal, The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), Reddit, etc. The repository contains various facets of blog data including blog site metadata like, user defined tags, predefined categories, blog site description; blog post level metadata like, user defined tags, date and time of posting; blog posts; blog post mood (which is defined as the blogger's emotions when (s)he wrote the blog post); blogger name; blog post comments; and blogger social network.

WAIS seminar: Alan Walks Wales: Data and Challenges

Abstract This seminar is a research discussion around a very interesting problem, which may be a good basis for a WAISfest theme. A little over a year ago Professor Alan Dix came to tell us of his plans for a magnificent adventure:to walk all of the way round Wales - 1000 miles 'Alan Walks Wales'. The walk was a personal journey, but also a technological and community one, exploring the needs of the walker and the people along the way. Whilst walking he recorded his thoughts in an audio diary, took lots of photos, wrote a blog and collected data from the tech instruments he was wearing. As a result Alan has extensive quantitative data (bio-sensing and location) and qualitative data (text, images and some audio). There are challenges in analysing individual kinds of data, including merging similar data streams, entity identification, time-series and textual data mining, dealing with provenance, ontologies for paths, and journeys. There are also challenges for author and third-party annotation, linking the data-sets and visualising the merged narrative or facets of it.