The web has evolved from a technology platform to a social milieu where factual, opinion and behavior data interleave. A number of social applications are being built to analyze and extract value from this data, encouraging us to adopt a data-driven approach to research.

I will describe a perspective on why and how social data management is fundamentally different from traditional data management. More specifically, I’ll talk about the research challenges raised b data preparation, information exploration and crowdsourced evaluation, three essential building blocks of today’s social applications.

This talk is based on published and ongoing work with colleagues at LIG, INRIA, UT Austin, U. of Trento, U. of Tacoma, and Google Research.