Social Media Visualization

Visualizations are an essential contribution in FUPOL in order to allow new approaches to get understanding for the issues regarding policy making. To support stakeholders in understanding citizens’ opinions, the social media analysis should help to identify them. Based on discussions in social media, e.g. on Facebook or on blogs, stakeholders should get the opportunity to topics that get important. Based on the observation of upcoming topics, stakeholders should be able to drill-down on concrete problems and what ideas do be mentioned there to solve it.

In general we can define two main strategies to initiate such a social media analysis. On the one hand the analysts can observe the relevance development of topics by time. Such an observation allows to early recognition of upcoming topics that should be analyzed in more detail by experts. In case of a new upcoming (hot) topic, the stakeholders can click on them for further information. So they can detect relevant information channels as well as opinion leaders.

On the other hand it can be start by a query search. Hereby, the stakeholder wants to analysis the discussions about a specific query. As an example, this strategy can be interesting to make analysis based on the objectives and goals of the decision makers. If decisions makers are focused on the social aspect, they can dedicatedly search about possible challenges in that focus. But also if such a topic is just important for specific region of a city, it is possible to check the feedbacks based on an explicit search about it.