Understanding semantics

A concept important to understand when handling unstructured data is semantics. Dictionaries define the term as the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.

It is a concept that comes from linguistic science and philosophy, to deal with the study and research of meaning. These meanings are uncovered by understanding the relationship between words, phrases, and all types of symbols. From a social media point of view, symbol could be the popular emoticons, which are not exactly formal language but they signify emotions. These symbols can be extended to images and videos, where patterns in their content can be used to extract meanings. In the later chapters, we will show few techniques that can help you to get meaning out of textual data. Extracting meaning or sense from images and videos is out of scope for the book. Semantic technology is very central to effectively analyzing unstructured social data.

For effectively extracting sense out of social data, semantic technologies have underlying artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms. These algorithms allow you to find patterns in the data, which are then humanly interpreted. That's why social data analytics is so exciting, as it brings together knowledge from the fields of semantics and machine learning, and then binds it with sociology for business or other objectives.