[…] “Big Data” becomes “Big Social Data” when it arises as a result of human-tohuman interaction, and herein lies the key to unlocking important insights about social processes operating at a worldwide scale as they unfold over time, the potential for which is greater than ever before because of the ubiquitousness of social media. Interactions can be of many kinds (conversation, exchange, response, relationship), and observed at the individual (survey response, votes, purchases), group, organization, and nation (trade, conflict, population movements) levels. When people interact through web, mobile device and distributed sensors, digital traces of these interactions are left behind. These historic interactions become more easily quantifiable through digitization and sharing of document and image archives. As a consequence, we face a transformative and disruptive data deluge, from which new scientific, economic, and social value can be extracted”
http://www.itu.dk/people/rkva/IWSB-2012/positionPapers/Goggins-CollaborativeB…
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