Selecting the best open source tools for collecting and visualzing social media content

Social media data and information become a real concern for many parties such as countries and organizations for analysis, strategies and decision making purposes. Selecting the best open source social media tool for collection and visualization data from social networks' web is a big challenge. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach to select the most appropriate tools for collecting and visualizing information that are available on social media web. The proposed approach has two phases, namely, evaluation and selection. The current practice of evaluation process involves expert users opinions on the tool to rate it's importance based on the users' satisfaction which is measured on the efficiency of the tool for finding required results. The evaluation phase of the proposed technique combines the current practice with the weight of importance, where the later one has been calculated by applying statistical methods. The selection phase has designed based on the well-known PROMETHEE technique. The results have been showed as a ranking list of the selected libraries and frameworks/tools for both the data collection and data visualization.