Towards Integrating Online Social Networks and Business Intelligence

The growing use of Online Social Networks (OSN) in recent years is attracting the interest of the corporate world, where departments interested in analyzing their contents have been dealing with such technology. There are a number of proposals in the literature illustrating algorithms for social network analysis and sentiment analysis to discover, respectively, patterns of relationships between individuals and qualitative aspects in recorded statements. Despite the importance of integrating social network and sentiment analysis with user’s decision making processes, there is a lack of research aimed at achieving such integration as far as OSNs are concerned. This paper proposes a Business Intelligence Architecture, called OSNBIA, to achieve such integration. A case study has been developed to illustrate the proposed architecture. It extracts data from Twitter and applies social network and sentiment analysis to generate a data warehouse, enabling thus new possibilities of OSN’s data manipulation through Business Intelligence technology.