International Journal of Computer Applications |
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
Volume 79 - Number 17 |
Year of Publication: 2013 |
Authors: S. I. Mfenyana, N. Moroosi, M. Thinyane, S. M. Scott |
10.5120/13964-1934 |
S. I. Mfenyana, N. Moroosi, M. Thinyane, S. M. Scott . Development of a Facebook Crawler for Opinion Trend Monitoring and Analysis Purposes: Case Study of Government Service Delivery in Dwesa. International Journal of Computer Applications. 79, 17 ( October 2013), 32-39. DOI=10.5120/13964-1934
For service providers it is important to know what the public thinks or requires. Having such knowledge can help in decision making and future planning. In nowadays there is very high usage of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) and blogs where people share their views, opinions, and thoughts. If service providers can keep track of such views, opinions or thoughts with regard to the services they provide, they can better their understanding about the public or clients' needs and improve the provision of relevant services. This paper presents a system prototype for performing trend analysis on Facebook. The proposed system crawl Facebook, indexes the data and provides user interface where end users can search and see the trend of topic of their choice. The main objective of this paper is to propose a framework that can contribute in the improvement of the way government official and normal citizens communicate in regard with service delivery in rural areas. The premise in this paper is that if the government can keep track of the citizen's opinions and thoughts with regards to service delivery, it can help improve the delivery of such services. This research and the implementation of the trend analysis tool is undertaken in the context of the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL), an Information and Communication Technologies for development (ICTD) intervention for Dwesa marginalized community located in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.