Unstructured data as a source of information about current trends  

Beside traditional market research tools process produced internet data – data that has not been collected for that specific purpose that is – has gained more and more importance for various industries and businesses. So-called web analytics help to retrieve data about the usage of certain web offers. These tools are easy to integrate into management information systems. 
Unstructured data from websites and social media however, is not taken into account. Valuable information about market changes and trends from blogs, websites or comments on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube or various sharing or rating features is therefore lost, even though this sort of information holds economic value. It could help businesses identifying new market opportunities, segmenting markets or reevaluating their range of services.

Music industry as main focus of the project

SAMBA concentrates on an industry which has big amounts of semi structured and unstructured data to its availability but at the same time does not yet use advanced methods of data analysis or databased management. Three use cases exemplify how social media data can be made exploitable for the strategic and operative management of labels, music publishers or radio stations. 
Any value creation chain in the music industry consists of three main aspects – creating new content, segmenting the market according to product similarity and classifying the life cycle of artists. The context based MIR (Music Information Retrieval), an established method, will be adapted for the more specific and smaller use cases of SAMBA. The project emphasizes the development of new sources of data and the integration of said sources into already existing information systems.

Project goals: industry and education

First and foremost, SAMBA aims at creating a technical infrastructure for the continuous inclusion and indexing of relevant social media data. Specific informational problems within the music industry can therefore be addressed and solved.
Secondly, the project aims at the creation, cultivation and interdisciplinary connection of competences regarding social media mining and databased management at the Institute of Media Economics and the Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten. Those are not only key points in the continuous development of our degree programs, but also main priorities when it comes to knowledge transfer and cooperation with our affiliated companies.