Description and Basic Concepts Clause Samples

Description and Basic Concepts. ‌ Google+ is a social networking platform for sharing on the Web. Google+ provides numerous ways of sharing and communication, including sharing stream of context posts, videos and pictures to video conferencing among people on the Google+ platform. Here we focus on those of interest to the project. Each user of Google+ has a profile that consists of several pieces of information about the user. This includes the user’s name, birthday, gender, a short piece of text written by the user about themselves, the user’s location, relationship status, the languages spoken by the user, a list of current or past organizations with which this person is associated, e.g. organizations the user has worked for, or studied at, and other details. These pieces of information can provide interesting demographic data with respect to any analysis that will be done within the NOMAD project on users’ opinion and arguments on public policies. For instance, given a particular policy, analyzing Google+ data one can categorize different user arguments on the given policy by gender, age, educational background, location, etc. Each user is associated with a stream of activities. Activities are typically pieces of text (content) posted to be shared with others user, but may include for instance checking-in at a restaurant or re-sharing other users’ activities. The content of the posts is of primary interest to the NOMAD project, since users through their posts can express their opinion and provide a series of arguments regarding any topic in their interest, which can be later analyzed. Apart from the content, activities may also come with attached articles, videos and images. The attached articles can also be of interest to the project since posts may express a user’s opinion about an article, and hence the article can help to place a user’s opinion in the right context. However, given that attached articles may or may not include publication dates and that time plays a significant role in the analysis to follow, it is unclear whether attached articles would help or introduce extra noise in the process. Activities have a large number of other descriptors, e.g. the time the activity was originally published and modified, the person that performed the activity, people who +1’ed the activity, people who re-shared the activity, some times even the latitude and longitude of the placethe activity occurred at, etc. Finally, each activity is associated with comments. Comments are replies to th...

Description and Basic Concepts. ‌ Blogger is a platform for creating websites that allow people to publish their thoughts on an ongoing basis and share it on the Web. Blogger is built on five basic concepts: • Blogs: A blog has posts and pages. This is the container for blog meta-information like blog name and Description. • Posts: A blog post is the publishable item that the blog author has created. This information is meant to be timely, reflecting what the authors want to publish to the world now. It is understood that as time passes, blog posts content ages and becomes less relevant. The content of the posts are of primary interest to the NOMAD project, since users through their posts can express their opinion and provide a series of arguments regarding any topic in their interest, which can be later analyzed. • Comments: A comment is the place where people other than the blog post author react to what the author has written. Comments, similar to Posts, are of primary interest to the NOMAD project, since Blogger users can express their thought and opinions about the content of the Post they comment on, which can be used for extracting arguments towards some policy that might be discussed in the original Post. • Pages: A page is a place for static content, such as biographical information, or the ways to contact the user. This is generally static information that doesn't change very often. Pieces of information contained in Pages can provide interesting demographic data with respect to any analysis that will be done within the NOMAD project on users’ opinion and arguments on public policies. For instance, given a particular policy, analyzing Pages’ data one can categorize different user arguments on the given policy by gender, age, educational background, location, etc.

Description and Basic Concepts. ‌ LinkedIn is a social networking platform mainly used for professional networking. As of June 2012, LinkedIn reports more than 175 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories in all occupations. People who have joined LinkedIn create a profile and fill it with their interests, qualifications, knowledge, past jobs and more. Registered users can connect with people by searching their name or organization, on the condition that they have stated how they know the person they are connecting to. Also there is a default ‘Friend’ option that doesn’t require to mention how do someone knows the person he is connecting to. Also LinkedIn provides the option to share a status update and also integration with Twitter. LinkedIn also gives the option to like, comment or share an Update or a Group, or share an Update. LinkedIn also provides the ability to create or join groups such as Alumni groups, Corporate groups etc. Although, from the first analysis LinkedIn seems not to offer useful, extractable content for the project, there are some interesting elements, such as Status updates, Comments on Status Updates and likes on Status updates that may provide potential to be exploited. Therefore, in order not to exclude the potential to be added at the NOMAD sources in a later stage, its capabilities is analysed herein. It is notable that various information about a user that has commented, shared or liked an update can be retrieved as well.

Description and Basic Concepts. ‌ Twitter is an online social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read text-based messages known as "tweets". Each tweet is maximum 140 characters long. A user can view videos and conversations directly in Tweets to get the whole story at a glance, and all in one place. A user can retweet another user’s tweet or add it to his favourites. He can also post pictures or photos. Another thing he can do is to follow other users on order to receive their tweets. For the project the topics of interest are tweets referring to a particular keyword, the retweets of a specific tweet and various information about the user that published the tweet or retweeted it. Twitter text corpus can be vary valuable for the project , as it has been adopted by civilians as a means of succinct expression in hot policy topics.

Description and Basic Concepts. ‌ Facebook is a social networking platform, with over one billion active users as of September 2012. Facebook provides multiple ways of sharing information and communication between the users. The ones, which are related to the project will be analysed below. Each Facebook user has a profile where he is able to add lot of information about her or himself. For example one is able to add his age, places where he has lived, religious views, political views, contact info, info about his work and education, his relationship status, etc. We mainly focus on users’ information that can be interesting for the project, for example in the demographic distribution of users’ arguments, which depends on data available from each user (gender, age, location, etc.). Each user belongs to Facebook’s Social Graph. This Graph consists of objects and connections. Objects refer to users, photos, videos, status updates and other elements and connections refer to friend relationships, photo tags, likes etc. One of the objects of interest of Facebook’s Graph is Status messages. A user can express his opinion and arguments about a topic and then, this argument or opinion can be liked or commented by other users. Through Facebook’s API the content of comments is available, the number of likes, the profile of the users that have commented and liked the Status message and other objects. Another object of interest is Photos. Like Status messages, Photos have connections such as likes and comments and so, demographic characteristics about the users that have liked a photo or have commented on it can be retrieved via the API. The same applies for objects like Video and Note. Finally, another capability that the Facebook’s API offers is “Insights”. Insights are offered for Pages (Fan Pages), Domains and applications. Insights provide information about a page such as number of posts within a page, the number of likes of a page, demographics about users that have visited the page, location information for users etc. Therefore, it will be valuable for the project, to get Insights about a Page that refers to a particular policy domain or belongs to a politician or an associated community.

Description and Basic Concepts. ‌ Wordpress is a free web-based software that allows users to publish and maintain blogs. Wordpress users are able to publish content, to indicate interest and as well comment to other users’ content. It also provides a user friendly interface for managing blogs’ appearance, tools to integrate with other platforms, such us Yahoo! 360 and capabilities for publishing polls. Content of posts, likes and comments that refer to a post are of primary interest of NOMAD project. However, the blogging platform ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇.▇▇▇ should not be confused with ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇.▇▇▇, which is a Content Management System.