Swarm Intelligence for Analyzing Opinions in Online Communities

Web 2.0 platforms change the collaboration within online communities. A new way of organizing and opinion exchanging derives from increased social interactions and networking among community members. These members join together in self-organizing groups where opinions are forming by social swarming. Explaining and predicting the evolutionary process of opinion formation by social swarming is not only a powerful instrument for opinion research but also a great challenge. A new approach is presented which enables the recognition of opinions of swarm members and the analysis of opinion formation in the overall swarm by combining methods from text mining and swarm intelligence. The concept is illustrated by an example.