The Triple-C project aims to strengthen the relations between Austrian scientists, policy makers, educators, environmental NGOs, news media and corporations - stakeholders who recognize the need for adaptation and mitigation, but differ in worldviews, goals and agendas. The collaboratory manages expert knowledge and provides a platform for effective communication and collaboration.

To increase awareness and the availability of environmental information, this project provides a comprehensive and continuously updated account of online media coverage on climate change and related issues. The portal aggregates, filters and visualizes environmental content from the Web sites of various stakeholders: 150 Anglo-American news media sites, blogs, environmental organizations, and the Fortune 1000 companies. Winner of the Digital Earth 3D Visualization Challenge 2007, held in conjunction with the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth (www.isde5.org).

Sentiment Quiz is an interactive real-time quiz in the tradition of games with a purpose. The multi-platform social media application is available for Facebook and as a widget for iGoogle and Netvibes. Together with Election Monitor 2008, Sentiment Quiz won the Social Media Category of the Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business.

The interdisciplinary Research Network on Environmental Online Communication brings scientists of different backgrounds together to explore the development, management, promotion and evaluation of networked information systems that advocate sustainability and the protection of natural ecosystems. The network supports the research activities of its members, identifies synergies, coordinates the various projects and helps with resource acquisition.

Built on more than five years of research into developing and managing Web-based information systems, the project analyzes navigational system and interface design from structural and textual perspectives. Web metrics aim to determine success factors and uncover weaknesses of deployed systems by comparing large samples of Web sites across regions and industries. Currently, webLyzard mirrors and analyzes a set of more than 6000 sites in monthly intervals.

Linguists define 'idiom' as an expression whose meaning is different from the literal meanings of its component words. Similarly, the study of information diffusion promises insights that cannot be inferred from individual network elements. Media monitoring projects often focus on a particular medium or neglect important aspects of the human language. The IDIOM project addresses these gaps to reveal fundamental mechanisms of information diffusion across the media with distinct interactive characteristics.

How do international media, the Fortune 1000 and environmental organizations tailor articles to fit their political agenda? To answer this question, the US Election 2004 Web Monitor processes more than 500,000 documents each week – about 125 million words in 11 million sentences. Estimates of attention and attitude towards the presidential candidates complement keywords summarizing key issues associated with each candidate.

The interdisciplinary Research Network on Environmental Online Communication brings scientists of different backgrounds together to explore the development, management, promotion and evaluation of networked information systems that advocate sustainability and the protection of natural ecosystems. The network supports the research activities of its members, identifies synergies, coordinates the various projects and helps with resource acquisition.

The Development of a Tourism Marketing Information System; Objective: Developing and testing interactive tools which support tourism related management tasks; Funded by the Austrian National Tourism Office and the European Travel Commission; project value approx. € 190,000 (since 1990).

Understanding urban tourism in Europe and creating a harmonized system of European City Tourism Statistics. The long-term objective of this project is to increase the awareness for regional tourism, particularly city tourism in Europe. Related to this research field is some work for an ESPON project ('Study on spatially relevant aspects of Tourism'), which may lead to a much larger EU funded project within the INTERREG/INTERACT program.

Intelligent Recommendation for Tourist Destination Decision Making. The purpose of this EU funded project (IST-2000-29474) is to develop and test a recommendation system using case-based reasoning techniques.

The investigation of domain-specific search engines for supporting the information search process of tourists has led to the creation of www.visiteuropeancities.info, a portal that makes websites for more than 200 city tourist offices accessible to the public. Basic research related to this area includes the investigation of the joint use of content and usage mining techniques in order to enhance interactive online marketing tools.

There is dramatic growth in internet usage especially for travel information search purposes. Each time an individual uses a website he or she leaves traces on that site. These traces can be collected and used for different purposes such as tracking user behavior, recommending products to the customer in their next visit to the website, or optimizing website usability. Although many tourism organizations are collecting these types of information from their websites, this information is not being used in making managerial decisions. The project directed towards city tourism managers will help to understand a tourism organization’s performance online, develop strategies for the continuous improvement of websites, benchmark organizations against each other, have industry specific analyses and retrieve real insights through the combination with external variables.

The European Cities Online Benchmarking Tool is designed and implemented by MODUL Research to help city tourism organizations in administering city tourism statistics in an easy and efficient way. The users can benchmark European cities in different dimensions such as arrivals, bednights, capacity, and occupancy rates of accommodations, making selections for different time spans as well as different source markets, which include British, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, total foreign, total domestic and total market. The results are shown as graphical charts that can be saved and used in reports or presentations. The data that is calculated to create the chart can also be saved as an excel document by the users. One advantage of this online tool is it can be customized according to the users’ needs. For instance, the chart settings can be changed, such as the colour of the bars/lines in the charts and the chart title font, size, and colour. In addition, the users can create their own benchmark group of cities for future calculations and save it in their queries. Whenever the users return to the site they can use their own benchmark group, which they created to benchmark with other European cities. Overall, this online tool is beneficial for city tourism organizations for analyzing city tourism statistics and benchmarking of different European cities.

This research project identifies and evaluates the different models and structures of implementing strategies of industrial clusters among states in the United States. The first set of results indicate there is a high degree of variation among states in which organizations and actors have responsibilities and authority, the degree to which clusters are identified and targeted by economic data analysis versus local experts, sources of funding, and degree of coordination with other approaches and strategies for regional economic development. Rather than one model of ‘best practice’, there appears to be many that depend upon state economic and industrial structure, political culture, and the analytical capacity of economic development staff.

Universities, as institutions, can ‘bring to the table’ high levels of specialized expertise and know-how, as well as certain types of moral authority and concern for the ‘public good’ that potentially can be employed to contribute to the solution of local and regional problems, and to provide leadership in helping elected officials move their regions forward in terms of innovative strategies, policies, laws, and institutional arrangements. The questions we ask in this project is to what extent are universities fulfilling this role, what are their motivations for doing so, what are their relationships with other actors in regional governance, and are there particular models of university involvement in regional governance that seem most effective for the promotion of regional social and economic development. The project, just underway, will be based upon a series of regional case studies.

Bioworks is a new, innovative job re-training program designed to prepare workers who have lost their jobs in declining industry sectors such as textiles, tobacco, and furniture production for manufacturing jobs in the biotechnology industry. The program consists of 120 hours of instruction and is located at eight different community colleges geographically distributed throughout North Carolina. Although the curriculum is standardized among the eight colleges, the array of additional services and the relationship of the colleges to employers vary. This research project utilizes a longitudinal database of enrollees in Bioworks to identify the factors that best explain which graduates of Bioworks receive job offers from biotechnology firms and which do not. We use human capital variables, institutional characteristics of the programs at each of the community colleges, regional economic and labor market conditions, and spatial variables to explain job outcomes.

Global change encompasses multiple fields: climate-, economic-, social-, and land use change. Knowledge about local effects of global change is still scarce and afflicted with high uncertainty. It is a crucial challenge for political and civil stakeholders to develop strategies to anticipate and cope with globally induced changes. Future.scapes will examine and downscale global change effects to local and regional level. The research will focus on those most pressing economic, societal and landscape transitions. It aims to support practitioners in recognising, understanding and managing change.

The project examines, to what extent energy-saving building methods and / or energy efficiency of buildings are expressed in their market values. Because of lower energy consumption and the associated lower running costs more energy efficient real estate is expected to be preferred by consumers / users and will therefore obtain higher values than less energy-efficient buildings. These higher market prices represent an important market incentive for investment in more energy efficient building methods and utilities. Valuation is an important instrument for the real estate economy. Therefore, first the question is examined whether energy efficiency plays a role in valuation appraisals (and if yes, which). First national and international standards will be examined. Then valuation appraisals, which were used in real estate practice, will be analyzed by means of a content analysis and if necessary a meta analysis. Experts might mention energy efficiency in their appraisals and in the form of anticipated payments consider it in addition to the prescribed elements of the evaluation.