Rai Research and Big Data – A model for integration and synthesis

In the Rai Research Center and Technology Innovation Center, for some years now, the study of the “Big Data” analysis techniques has led to the realization of a complete demonstration prototype that can bring together various sources of information from the television world and the WEB world, this system is able to collect and put in relation the typical data of television broadcasts such as EPGs and archives and data from social networks (Twitter and Facebook).

The platform analyzes the various data sources using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, extracts concepts that are associated with ontologies (for example, using Linked Open Data), all extracted information is stored and linked using an integration model for the synthesis of unstructured, highly dynamic data. On the multi-source unified representation model, queries can be launched and then is possible to pass information to different analysis tools and display modules for multiple purposes.

The Rai Like platform 

The Rai Like Platform was born to perform the analysis, visualization and interpretation of the data contained within the knowledge model. It is a web application that allows you to navigate in the space of concepts coming from social networks and associated to the television world thanks to the integration of the TV program guide.

Through the Rai Like platform you can identify and visualize phenomena that occur on social networks in relation to the television world such as emerging phenomena, their temporal evolution and the relationships between the entities involved. The conceptual navigation network allows you to walk through the concepts mentioned within television events in a particular timeline based on mentions during television events, and also to identify the context of similar conceptions and TV events.

Particularly interesting is the field of community analysis, a community is a group of people interested in a specific topic, or a common approach to relationship life, which correspond to each other through social networks, constituting a social network with features peculiar. The system allows the recognition, analysis and characterization of communities through different networks of interaction among users with the ability to locate influential users and the evolution over time of the communities themselves, a tool very useful for recommendation engines to customizing services to users.

In addition, experiments were conducted to analyze the “migration flow” of users between different television events over time, with the recognition and characterization of emerging topics, topic-topic dependency and user-topic, and evolution over time such reports. further experiments were carried out with the integration of audience data to try to predict topics of interest in social media by analyzing TV programs and estimate the success of a TV broadcast by analyzing data from social media.

The Rai Like platform can therefore be used as a valuable tool to support “Social Media Marketing” also in the television domain, that is, the marketing branch that deals with analyzing and generating visibility into social media and virtual communities. It includes a series of practices ranging from managing online reports to optimizing web pages made for social media. The term is commonly used to indicate the management of integrated communication on all the different platforms that the Web makes available.

Digital Storytelling

Furthermore, the described platform can be used as a data source to tell television events from the point of view of users who have lived and commented on them, creating an unseen story that sees as protagonists the viewers themselves with their perception and emotions tried during the viewing of a television program. In fact Digital Storytelling consists in organizing selected content from the web in a coherent system based on a narrative structure, in order to obtain a tale composed of multiple elements of various formats (video, audio, images, texts, maps, etc.). It is therefore a form of narrative particularly suitable for communicative forms such as journalism, politics, marketing, autobiography, didactics and new frontiers in the television world to provide information and entertainment experiences that can be visualized through different devices of fruition in synergy with each other.