Media Watch Tracks Online Coverage of the Upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen

From December 7 to 15, the world's attention will be focused on the United Nation's Climate Change Conference (COP15) to be held in Copenhagen, Denkmark. The global importance of the event has sparked the interest of news media, blog authors, environmental organizations and the corporate sector alike. Given the resulting flood of comments, position statements and articles, it is becoming increasingly difficult for observers to obtain an objective and transparent overview of the perceptions and opinions of the various stakeholder groups.

The Media Watch on Climate Change addresses this problem. To track and visualize the main topics of the upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen, the portal processes and filters hundred thousands of Web documents. The visual information exploration and retrieval interface includes geographic displays, domain ontologies, tag clouds, maps of document clusters, and information retrieval agents suggesting documents about similar topics and nearby locations. The user manual is available in PDF format and contains a detailed description of the portal's search functionality, trend charts and visual exploration features.

Released just-in-time for COP15, the latest edition of the Web portal features an increased update frequency (four times a day), a higher precision in identifying relevant material, improved performance of the underlying semantic search algorithms, the real-time visualization of semantic associations between popular terms as well as automated summaries of all documents contained in the knowledge base.

The Media Watch on Climate Change is the winner of the Digital Earth 3D Visualization Grand Challenge, a finalist of the Semantic Web Challenge, and has received a Jury Award at the Austrian National Prize for Multimedia and e-Business 2009 (an annual award sponsored by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economics and Labor, which honors outstanding multimedia projects). The Web portal is currently being maintained and extended within the FIT-IT Semantic Systems Project RAVEN (Relation Analysis and Visualization for Evolving Networks).

Web Resources

• www.ecoresearch.net/climate (Media Watch on Climate Change)
• www.modul.ac.at/nmt/raven (RAVEN Project)
• www.idiom.at (IDIOM Project)