Online Forums vs. Social Networks: Two Case Studies to Support eGovernment with Topic Opinion Analysis

This paper suggests how eGovernment and public services can apply "topic-opinion" analysis developed in the EC IST FP7 WeGov project on citizens' opinions on the Internet. In many cases, discussion tracks on the Internet become quite long and complex. Stakeholders are often interested in gaining a quick overview of such a discussion, including understanding its thematic aspects, identifying key arguments and key users. The topic opinion analysis that is part of the WeGov toolbox aims to provide appropriate summarization techniques by identifying latent themes of discussion topics, most relevant contributions and arguments for each topic, as well as identifying the most active users that influenced a certain aspect of discussion. In this paper we focus on online forums and social networks as digital places where users discuss potential political issues. Therefore we setup two different case studies to validate the accuracy and usefulness of analysis results of the topic opinion analysis.