User
Short Bio
Arno Scharl heads the Department of New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna. Prior to this appointment, he held professorships at Graz University of Technology and the University of Western Australia, and the position of a Key Researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for Knowledge Management. Mr. Scharl completed his doctoral research at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and also holds a PhD and MSc from the University of Vienna, Department of Sports Physiology. Returning from fellowships at the University of California at Berkeley and Curtin University of Technology (funded by an Erwin Schrödinger Research Grant of the Austrian Science Fund), he submitted his habilitation on “Evolutionary Web Development” to the Vienna University of Economics and Business, for which he was awarded the venia docendi and the Senator Wilhelm Wilfling Award in 2000. Mr. Scharl edited two books in Springer’s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series on "The Geospatial Web" and “Environmental Online Communication”, founded the ECOresearch Network and served as co-chair of the 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection.
Research Interests
His current research interests focus on text mining, integrating semantic and geospatial Web technology, media monitoring, virtual communities and computer-mediated collaboration.
Further Information:
Courses @ MU
- Web Mining and New Media Technology
- Sustainable Tourism
- E-Business
Awards
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2008 : Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-business (Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft)
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2008 : FIT-IT Award 3rd prize (Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technology)
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2007 : Digital Earth 3D Visualization Grand Challenge Winner ()
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2000 : Senator Wilhelm-Wilfling-Award (Senator Wilhelm Wilfling Stiftung)
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1999 : Erwin Schrödinger Research Grant (FWF Der Wissenschaftsfonds)
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1999 : OeNB-WU Research Prize (Austrian National Bank)
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1998 : Excellent Doctoral Thesis Award (University of Vienna)
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1998 : Stephan Koren-Award (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien)
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1997 : Rudolf Sallinger-Award (Österreichischer Wirtschaftsbund)
Projects
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ReTV - Enhancing and Repurposing TV Content
ReTV aims to provide broadcasters and content distributors with technologies and insights to leverage the converging digital media landscape. By advancing the state of the art in the analysis of this media landscape and providing novel methods to dynamically re-purpose content for an array of media vectors (= all relevant digital channels), a Trans-Vector Platform (TVP) will provide these stakeholders with the ability to "publish to all media vectors with the effort of one". It will empower broadcasters and consumer brands to continuously measure their brand reputation, and to compute success metrics that predict reach and audience engagement of content and advertisements across vectors. This will allow editors, program planners and communication managers to optimize decision making processes.
Organisations: Modul Technology GmbH, MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.01.2018 - 31.12.2021
Managed By: Modul Technology GmbH
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Digital Tourism Experts
The aim of the "Digital Tourism Expert" initiative is to provide the participating company partner with relevant digital know-how and to test and implement it with the help of initial digital projects (Transfer-Projects). Therefore, 14 educational modules were developed which on the one hand deliver digital marketing know-how and on the other hand provide knowledge to create the right structural requirements for becoming a digital tourism company. Both competencies will create the skills to implement a digital transfer project in the final phase of the project. In these projects the companies implement innovative digital processes or projects guided by the coaches from the universities.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of Tourism and Service Management, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Karl Wöber, Astrid Dickinger, Arno Scharl
Date: 01.01.2018 - 31.12.2020
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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RAVEN - Relation Analysis and Visualization for Evolving Networks
The RAVEN research project's aim is to keep users, analysts and decision-makers up-to-date about the unfolding of events in endogenous and exogenous information spaces, which themselves reflect interconnected events and processes of the real world. RAVEN aims to understand the evolution of these spaces by analyzing temporal-semantic relations between their elements. RAVEN has a social layer by enabling users to release non-confidential interpersonal messages to this repository, and by extracting annotations from retrieved documents. Third-party resources are added through a Web mining and media monitoring platform.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology, Department of Tourism and Service Management
Author: Arno Scharl, Stefan Gindl, Astrid Dickinger
Date: 01.01.2008 - 30.10.2010
Managed By: Department of New Media Technology
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UNEP Live
UNEP Live is a Web intelligence platform for global environmental indicators and related communication flows. It helps stakeholders to meet environmental goals and foster sustainable development. The platform analyzes public opinion trends on air quality, biodiversity and climate change from news and social media, policy makers, and environmental organizations. Fully integrated into the UNEP Live knowledge management platform, webLyzard helps align and compare relevant articles and postings from these online sources with various environmental indicators.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl, Ruslan Kamolov, Rod Michael Coronel, Lucas Gerrand, Tim Lammarsch
Date: 01.04.2015 - 31.05.2016
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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DIVINE - Dynamic Integration and Visualization of Information from Multiple Evidence Sources
DIVINE integrates data from structured, unstructured and social sources to build information spaces. Lightweight seed ontologies act as focal points for integrating new evidence from third-party sources. Since such evidence is inherently uncertain, source-specific transformation rules assign confidence values to newly acquired pieces of knowledge.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl, Marta Sabou, Stefan Gindl, Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel
Date: 01.07.2011 - 31.12.2013
Managed By: Department of New Media Technology
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ETIHQ - Exposing Tourism Indicators as High Quality Linked Data
Although the tourism domain heavily relies on complex decision making, it currently lacks decision support systems with the capability to seamlessly integrate and visualise data from multiple data sources of tourism (and other) indicators. Linked Data technologies, by contrast, especially when adopted at large scale, greatly facilitate data integration at the syntactic and semantic level alike by providing a uniform data encoding format. Such technologies also help to clearly specify the meaning of the data and to establish links between various datasets. In this project we will use Linked Data technologies to create a reference repository of tourism indicators (ETIHQ) by exposing the content of TourMIS, a major source of European tourism statistics, as high-quality Linked Data. We will ensure data quality by providing semantically rich vocabularies that will support (i) the specification of the meaning of tourism statistics and (ii) the provenance of the data items. To demonstrate the benefits of using Linked Data, we will design and implement a decision support system that makes use of the ETIHQ repository and leverages its detailed semantic specifications to provide appropriate access control mechanisms.
Organisations: Department of New Media Technology, Department of Tourism and Service Management, MODUL University Vienna
Author: Marta Sabou, Adrian Brasoveanu, Irem Önder, Arno Scharl, Karl Wöber
Date: 01.10.2013 - 01.10.2014
Managed By: Department of New Media Technology
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Media Watch on Climate Change
The Media Watch on Climate Change is a comprehensive and continuously updated knowledge repository on climate change and related environmental issues. The dashboard provides interactive means to access this repository, analyze stakeholder perceptions, and track emerging trends. It collects, filters, annotates and visualizes documents from a wide range of English, French and German online sources (news media, social networking platforms, Web sites of Fortune 1000 companies and environmental organizations).
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.08.2007 -
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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Forstrat Cockpit 2
The project Foresight-Cockpit 2.0 supplements the preceding project by enabling the analysts to process a greater variety of topics simultaneously and independently. By this, it aims at improving the collaboration between different departments in the development of a common situational awareness based on real-time data. In order to achieve this, it integrates in the system modern methods and tools for social media analysis, which will support the creation, evaluation and deduction of trends and scenarios. Additionally, the improved software will make it easier to translate the results of the analyses in alternative strategic courses of action that are relevant from a national perspective.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.10.2016 - 30.09.2017
Managed By: Department of New Media Technology
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US Election 2004 Web Monitor
The | US Election 2004 Web Monitor Web Monitor captures the Web sites of the Fortune 1000 (the biggest US companies in terms of revenue), environmental organizations and international media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. From these sites, the system processes more than 500,000 documents each week, comprising 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.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.01.2004 -
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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Information Diffusion across Interactive Online Media
IDIOM is a two-year research project funded by FIT-IT Semantic Systems, a program of the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology in cooperation with the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and Eutema Technology Management. IDIOM aims to: - investigate new visual interfaces to create, access and analyze electronic content; - reveal fundamental mechanisms of information diffusion across media with distinct interactive characteristics. Recent advances in collaborative Web technology are governed by strong network effects and the harnessing of collective intelligence through customer-self service and algorithmic data management. As a result, information spreads rapidly across Web sites, blogs, Wiki applications, and direct communication channels between members of online communities who utilize these services. The IDIOM (Information Diffusion across Interactive Online Media) project will support and investigate electronic interactivity by means of a generic, service-oriented architecture. This architecture will include ontology-based tools to build and maintain contextualized information spaces, a framework for analyzing content diffusion and interaction patterns within these spaces, and interface technology that enables users switch between semantic and geospatial topologies. IDIOM introduces Knowledge Planets as a radically new interface metaphor that leverages the new generation of geo-browsing platforms such as NASA World Wind and Google Earth as a front-end for its portfolio of semantic services. 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. Despite growing research interest, the “Web 2.0” is still dominated by prototypes and mash-ups. At the same time, media monitoring and corporate knowledge management projects lack analytical frameworks, focus on one particular medium, or neglect the dual role of users as consumers and producers of information. IDIOM will address these gaps to reveal fundamental mechanisms of information diffusion across media with distinct interactive characteristics, providing a set of generic services to analyze the production and consumption of electronic content simultaneously.
Organisations: Department of Tourism and Service Management, MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Astrid Dickinger, Arno Scharl
Date: 06.07.2006 - 05.06.2009
Managed By: Department of New Media Technology
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Climate Change Collaboratory (Triple-C)
The Climate Change Collaboratory (Triple-C) aims to strengthen the relations between environmental stakeholders who recognize the need for climate change adaptation and mitigation, but differ in their specific worldviews, goals and agendas. For this purpose, the collaboratory provides tools to manage expert knowledge as well as a context-sensitive environment for creating and editing documents in a collaborative manner. Building upon the award-winning technology behind the Media Watch on Climate Change, the user's semantic context is provided by a real-time synchronization framework for rendering advanced visualizations including information landscapes, geographic projections, and ontology graphs. Innovative survey instruments in the tradition of “games with a purpose” create shared meaning through collaborative ontology building, and leverage the extensive user base of social networking platforms to capture indicators of environmental attitudes, lifestyles and behaviors. Two project workshops help align Triple-C with the research activities of its associate partners, increase the project’s visibility, and foster the collaboration with leading international organizations.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl, Sabine Sedlacek
Date: 01.03.2010 - 20.09.2012
Managed By: Department of New Media Technology
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uComp
The rapid growth and fragmented character of social media and publicly available structured data challenges established approaches to knowledge extraction. Many algorithms fail when they encounter noisy, multilingual and contradictory input. Efforts to increase the reliability and scalability of these algorithms face a lack of suitable training data and gold standards. Given that humans excel at interpreting contradictory and context-dependent evidence, the uComp project will address the above mentioned shortcomings by merging collective human intelligence and automated knowledge extraction methods in a symbiotic fashion. The project will build upon the emerging field of Human Computation (HC) in the tradition of games with a purpose and crowdsourcing marketplaces. It will advance the field of Web Science by developing a scalable and generic HC framework for knowledge extraction and evaluation, delegating the most challenging tasks to large communities of users and continuously learning from their feedback to optimise automated methods as part of an iterative process. A major contribution is the proposed foundational research on Embedded Human Computation (EHC), which will advance and integrate the currently disjoint research fields of human and machine computation. EHC goes beyond mere data collection and embeds the HC paradigm into adaptive knowledge extraction workflows. An open evaluation campaign will validate the accuracy and scalability of EHC to acquire factual and affective knowledge. In addition to novel evaluation methods, uComp will also provide shared datasets and benchmark EHC against established knowledge processing frameworks. While uComp methods will be generic and evaluated across domains, climate change was chosen as the main use case for its challenging nature, subject to fluctuating and often conflicting interpretations. Public showcases include the Media Watch on Climate Change and the Climate Resilience Toolkit. The ongoing collaboration with international organisations such as the Climate Program Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Earth Observatory will increase impact, provide a rich stream of input data, attract and retain a critical mass of users, and promote the adoption of EHC among a wide range of stakeholders.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 15.11.2012 - 14.05.2016
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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DecarboNet
DecarboNet is a research project funded by the European Commission to investigate the potential of social platforms in mitigating climate change. Engaging the public in energy debates and encouraging behaviour change are essential strategies for reducing energy consumption and saving our planet. Studies show that information and technology alone are insufficient for changing behaviour towards more sustainable lifestyle choices, and that what is needed is a combination of socio-technical interventions. How to raise awareness collectively by means of social platforms and how to transform it into behaviour change are some of the challenges addressed by the project’s research agenda. DecarboNet is funded by CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability & Social Innovation), a FP7 and H2020 research programme of the European Commission to enable new forms of social innovation and leverage emerging network effects by combining social media, distributed knowledge creation and data from the “Internet of Things”, increasing awareness and identifying possible solutions to problems that require collective efforts. Witness emerging DecarboNet technologies in action by exploring the Media Watch on Climate Change, participating in the Climate Challenge, or using the faceted search of the Climate Resilience Toolkit.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.10.2013 - 30.11.2016
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
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PHEME – Computing Veracity across Media, Languages, and Social Networks
Analyzing big data repositories aggregated from context-dependent social media streams poses three major computational challenges: volume, velocity, and variety. This project will focus on a fourth, hitherto largely unstudied computational challenge: veracity. It will model, identify, and verify phemes (Internet memes with added information on truthfulness or deception) as they spread across media, languages, and social networks.
Organisations: MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology
Author: Arno Scharl
Date: 01.10.2013 - 31.03.2017
Managed By: MODUL University Vienna
Research Output
- 2017
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"Aspect-Based Extraction and Analysis of Affective Knowledge from Social Media Streams"2017 in: IEEE Intelligent Systems. Volume: 32. Issue number: 3 Pages: 80-88
Extracting and analyzing affective knowledge from social media in a structured manner is a challenging task. Decision makers require insights into the public perception of a company's products and services, as a strategic feedback channel to guide communication campaigns, and as an early warning system to quickly react in the case of unforeseen events. The approach presented in this paper goes beyond bipolar metrics of sentiment. It combines factual and affective knowledge extracted from rich public knowledge bases to analyze emotions expressed towards specific entities (targets) in social media. We obtain common and common-sense domain knowledge from DBpedia and ConceptNet to identify potential sentiment targets. We employ affective knowledge about emotional categories available from SenticNet to assess how those targets and their aspects (e.g. specific product features) are perceived in social media. An evaluation shows the usefulness and correctness of the extracted domain knowledge, which is used in a proof-of-concept data analytics application to investigate the perception of car brands on social media in the period between September and November 2015.
Author(s): Albert Weichselbraun, Stefan Gindl, Fabian Fischer, Svitlana Vakulenko, Arno Scharl
Publication date: 5. 2017
Volume: 32
Issue number: 3
Pages: 80-88
Electronic version(s), related files and links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2017.57
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"uComp Language Quiz - A Game with a Purpose for Multilingual Language Resource Acquisition"2017
Author(s): Arno Scharl, Michael Föls
Publication date: 1. 1. 2017
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"Visualizing statistical linked knowledge for decision support"2017 in: Semantic Web Journal. Volume: 8. Issue number: 1 Pages: 113-137
In a global and interconnected economy, decision makers often need to consider information from various domains. A tourism destination manager, for example, has to correlate tourist behavior with financial and environmental indicators to allocate funds for strategic long-term investments. Statistical data underpins a broad range of such cross-domain decision tasks. A variety of statistical datasets are available as Linked Open Data, often incorporated into visual analytics solutions to support decision making. What are the principles, architectures, workflows and implementation design patterns that should be followed for building such visual cross-domain decision support systems. This article introduces a methodology to integrate and visualize cross-domain statistical data sources by applying selected RDF Data Cube (QB) principles. A visual dashboard built according to this methodology is presented and evaluated in the context of two use cases in the tourism and telecommunications domains.
Author(s): Adrian Brasoveanu, Marta Sabou, Arno Scharl, Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel, Daniel Fischl
Publication date: 2017
Volume: 8
Issue number: 1
Pages: 113-137
Electronic version(s), related files and links: http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/SW-160225
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"Video Retrieval for Multimedia Verification of Breaking News on Social Networks"2017
Author(s): Lyndon Nixon, Shu Zhu, Walter Rafelsberger, Fabian Fischer, Max Göbel, Arno Scharl
Publication date: 2017
- 2016
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"Tourism Intelligence and Visual Media Analytics for Destination Management Organizations"2016 Tourism on the Verge Pages: 165-178
Understanding dynamic changes in tourist perceptions and analyzing user-generated content to assess the impact of campaigns and promotional activities are among the key questions facing many destination management organizations. Web intelligence platforms help to answer these questions, particularly when they are scalable enough to analyze and visualize Web-scale information flows in real time. This paper presents a tourism Web intelligence platform for acquiring and processing real-time streams of online content from Web sites and social media platforms, advanced methods to extract factual and affective knowledge from these sources, and interactive visualization techniques to explore topical trends and assess the impact of communication campaigns. The extracted knowledge is analyzed from a destination image perspective, incorporating Aaker’s dimensions of brand personality. The chapter highlights the importance of real-time analytics solutions for marketers to respond in a timely manner and adapt their positioning strategies.
Author(s): Arno Scharl, Lidija Lalicic, Irem Önder
Publication date: 1. 12. 2016
Series information: Tourism on the Verge
Publisher: Springer
Pages: 165-178
Host publication editor(s): Z. Xiang, D. Fesenmaier
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