A Multidomain and Multilingual Conceptual Data Model for Online Reviews Representation

Abstract

User-Generated Content (UGC) such as online reviews are freely available in the web. This kind of data has been used to support clients’ and managerial decision making in several industries, e.g. books, tourism or hospitality. However, the challenge is how to represent this information in a structured way in order to leverage on the information provided by the use of Web 2.0 applications. To deal with this challenge, models and metamodels have been used to support a set of concrete applications in several sub-domains into Computer Science and Information Systems body of knowledge (Karagiannis and Höfferer, 2006). This paper focuses on the model-driven engineering and introduces a new multidomain and multilingual conceptual data model to represent UGC. This model is based on a characterization of online reviews and aims to capture all the facets of these reviews. The characterization of the reviews’ sentences extends previous models (such as Martin and White, 2007; Ding et al., 2008; Liu, 2010). Applications build on the model proposed in this paper may allow in-depth analysis of the fine-grained and disperse knowledge existent in the UGC. Furthermore, as this model is domain-independent it can be used to represent multiple types of reviews.