Guest editorial: content, concept and context mining in social media

In the last few years, we have witnessed an exponentially growing amount of social media data from social networks, mainly driven by the huge popularity of Web and the rapid advances of multimedia and Internet technologies. Different from conventional data types, social media data are multi-model in nature, including content such as images, audio, and videos, concept such as discussion topic, tag, and annotation, and context such as links, profile, timestamp, and click-through. All these content, concept and context are essential data sources for mining semantics, user intents, trends, knowledge, etc., from social media data, as well as enabling intelligent applications on social media services. This rich media type has raised many new research challenges, ranging from large-scale social media content analysis and mining, concept discovery and monitoring, context-based services, to many other exciting new opportunities. The aim of this special issue is to bring out state-of-the-art research in this area and discover directions for future research. The special issue will serve as a forum for recent advances in the field, with an emphasis on mining the “3 C” (Content, Concept and Context). It received an enthusiastic response. Among 19 submissions, 5 papers were selected after several rounds of rigorous review by the guest editors and the invited reviewers. World Wide Web (2012) 15:115–116 DOI 10.1007/s11280-011-0142-4