Dynamics of trending topics : smart service systems using trending topics

What is the definition of trending topic? Trending topic is the topic that a great amount of people are interested in. While trending topics could be detected from the offline survey or newspaper in the past, those topics can be easily detected from online these days. The rise of new types of social networking services, such as Facebook or Twitter, has caused the accumulation of unprecedented amount of web social data. This large amount of social data attracts many researchers' and companies' attention since it enables to collect and monitor the social interests with reducing the time and cost for the quantitative survey. Almost all web and social networking services analyze their user created social data and detect the most popular terms that are discussed and searched by their users. The popular terms are detected and published in the list, called 'Trending Topic' list. Awareness and utilization of trending topics plays a crucial role in various fields, including marketing, politics, and economics. This dissertation focuses on the following three studies. The first study is to analyse the nature of trending topics and reveal the important aspects. The second study is to identify the relevance of trending topic to a target object, such as individuals or organisations. It discovers how a trending topic affects a target group or individual. The impact strength of a trending topic is closely related to the strength of the relationship between the user and the issue. Therefore, this study will propose a method to identify the relevance between users and trending topics. The last study is to develop the model that predicts the trends of trending topics in the future. This study focuses on the formation and fading of trending topics and the trend during this lifecycle. Moreover, the dissertation also propose a model that represents the diffusion drifting movement of trending topic among different online communities