The ‘Big Social Data’ paradigm: definition, key features, and applicative contexts

The exponential growth of data existing on the web and generated by organizations and individuals, computer systems and digital devices, is opening new scenarios and opportunities for their exploitation, and new technological and managerial challenges are arising about the collection, transformation, storage, processing, usage, and visualization of such huge amount of data. The Big Data paradigm has therefore emerged as a socio-technical system that allows for offering innovative services in many data-intensive applications and domains. Within the Big Data field, the Big Social Data concept emerged as a relatively new phenomenon with multiple meanings and applications. According to the literature, the Big Social Data paradigm still lacks of a clear and shared definition. Thus, through a Systematic Literature Review, this paper aims at fulfilling this gap by providing a conceptualization of the Big Social Data paradigm that includes a possible definition, the distinguishing characteristics and properties, and some applications in real-life settings. Furthermore, by leveraging an existing taxonomy of data types, this paper proposes an extension that is specific for the Big Social Data domain, by introducing a new category of data type, namely “Digital Context Data”, which includes data related to the patterns of digital context dynamics. Finally, specifically for this new category of data type, two example applications in data-intensive domains (i.e. smart tourism and e-health) have been provided to demonstrate how the Big Social Data paradigm can describe, both explicitly and implicitly, the patterns of digital context dynamics.