Online communities generate major economic value and form pivotal parts of corporate expertise management, marketing, product support, CRM, product innovation and advertising. Communities can exceed millions of users and infrastructures must support hundreds of millions discussion threads that link together billions of posts.

ROBUST is targeted at developing methods to understand and manage the business, social and economic objectives of the users, providers and hosts and to meet the challenges of scale and growth in large communities. Hence, the objectives of ROBUST are to find solutions for community risk management, large scale data management, models of community polity and politics, community simulation and community data analysis.

DIMA contributes to this project by developing scalable methods for processing huge amounts textual data such as forum post as well as graph data representing the social structure of a community. They defined and implemented a common set of operators, e.g. for computing fundamental metrics of graphs and interesting statistics of text corpora, which can be efficiently executed in parallel on massively parallel data processing systems such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Giraph or Stratosphere. These operators are used by other partners to enable more complex algorithms for Community Analysis. Scalability is a crucial component of the ROBUST platform, because it ensures that the analysis algorithms developed by the project will scale to truly Big Amounts of data.

Project coordinator:

Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab, Universität Koblenz-Landau (DE)

Partners:

• Universität Koblenz-Landau (DE)
• SAP AG (DE)
• IBM Israel – Science and Technology LTD (IL)
• National University of Ireland, Galway (IE)
• University of Southampton (UK)
• Technische Universität Berlin (DE)
• TEMIS S.A. (FR)
• Software Mind SA (PL)
• The Open University (UK)
• MeaningMine Ltd. (IE)

Project Duration: 2010 - 2014