IDIOM | FIT-IT Semantic Systems Project

Relaunch of the Media Watch on Climate Change Brings IDIOM to a Successful Close

scharl — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:00:29 +0000

Every 5th of June, the UN World Environment Day aims to stimulate awareness of environmental issues and encourage political action. This event emphasizes the importance of new forms of communication and collaboration for addressing global environmental problems. Acquiring, managing and applying knowledge are crucial steps in ensuring that change is conceived and implemented on both regional and society-wide scales. Following two and a half years of active research and development work, the relaunch of the Media Watch on Climate Change not only brings the IDIOM project to a successful close, but also represents an important piece in the puzzle to increase transparency, create shared meaning and support sustainable processes.

To improve environmental awareness and help users access topical and relevant information, the Media Watch on Climate Change 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 corporate sector. The user manual contains a detailed description of the portal’s search functionality, trend charts and visual exploration features.

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IDIOM Prototype Wins Social Media Category of the Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business

scharl — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 07:53:59 +0000

One of the IDIOM prototypes, the US Election 2008 Web Monitor, has won the category ‘Online Communities, Web 2.0 and Social Networks’ at the Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business. The system includes a social application called ‘Sentiment Quiz’, built on top of the Facebook platform, which follows the tradition of “Games with a Purpose” by inviting Facebook users and their network of online friends to evaluate whether sentences from an archive of election-related documents express positive or negative sentiment.

After tracking candidate performance during the primaries and continuously refining the analyses, the IDIOM team (see photo below, which was taken during the award ceremony) has recently re-launched the Web site at www.ecoresearch.net/election2008. The Web site now focuses on the presidential candidates and their running mates, supplements the analytical tools with semantic and geospatial interfaces, and includes two social media applications built upon the Facebook platform.

Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business

IDIOM Team at the Award Ceremony

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NASA Presents Knowledge Planet at JavaOne Conference

idiom — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:40:47 +0000

JavaOne is the largest annual gathering of Java developers and an eagerly anticipated opportunity to witness the latest technology trends. At this year’s conference in San Francisco, NASA developers showed that virtual globes are not only suited to explore geographic maps, but can also serve as rendering engines for other types of imagery. Tom Gaskins, who leads the NASA World Wind engineering team, demonstrated the first official Knowledge Planet prototype, a Java applet developed by the Austrian IDIOM Research Project that visualizes large document collections using a landscape metaphor.

Project spokesperson, Prof. Arno Scharl of MODUL University Vienna’s Department of New Media Technology, describes how the planet metaphor allows the representation of massive amounts of textual data. “At the time of map generation, the knowledge planet’s topography is calculated by analyzing thousands of documents. The peaks of the virtual landscape indicate abundant coverage on a particular topic, whereas valleys and oceans represent sparsely populated parts of the information space. The landscape is then projected onto virtual globes such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. As only World Wind is available under an open-source license and allows full integration into existing Web applications through its Java Software Development Kit, it was the natural choice for implementing our prototype.”

The Java applet rendering the knowledge planet draws upon the extensive news archive of the Media Watch on Climate Change, which provides a continuously updated account of media coverage on climate change and related issues. Aiming to increase awareness and the availability of environmental information, the system filters and visualizes more than 200,000 documents from Anglo-American news media sites in weekly intervals.

Online Resources

Media Watch on Climate Change
http://www.ecoresearch.net/climate
Knowledge Planet
http://www.ecoresearch.net/climate/knowledge-planet

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Launch of the US Election 2008 Web Monitor

scharl — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:06:32 +0000

This new application based on IDIOM technology tracks the candidates’ performance on the campaign trail. Weekly snapshots of Web coverage reveal regional differences and contrast the perceptions of different stakeholders.

Web Site: www.ecoresearch.net/election2008
Screen Cast: www.ecoresearch.net/election2008/download

The system gathers content from environmental organizations, blogs, the Fortune 1000, and international media from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week. An automated process identifies attention by counting references to a candidate. It measures sentiment towards the candidate by looking for positive and negative expressions that co-occur with these references. Keyword lists reflect the most important topics associated with the candidate. Interactive visualizations allow a closer examination of the gathered data. Information landscapes, geographic maps, ontology graphs and tag clouds help understand complex semantic relationships. Besides tracking recent developments, users can also cast their vote for their preferred candidate.

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International Award for IDIOM Climate Change Portal

idiom — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 06:16:12 +0000

We are happy to announce the official launch of the Media Watch on Climate Change, an award-winning Geospatial Web application. Google, NASA, ESRI and other technology leaders were sponsoring the 3D Visualization Grand Challenge and attended the awards ceremony held at the University of California at Berkeley on June 7th (www.isde5.org). The Web portal is available online at:

www.ecoresearch.net/climate

Aiming to increase awareness and the accessibility of environmental information, the Media Watch provides a continuously updated account of media coverage on climate change and related issues. The portal aggregates, filters and visualizes environmental Web content from about 150 Anglo-American news media sites. Automated content analysis extracts geospatial context to build a comprehensive, geotagged knowledge base. A visual interface provides interactive access to this knowledge base. It shows that geobrowsers are not only suited to explore geographic features, but can also be used to render other types of imagery such as three-dimensional Knowledge Planets.

Environmental communication and collaboration are crucial to conceiving and implementing change on both regional and society-wide scales. Within the next six months, the Media Watch will therefore be extended into an interactive collaboratory for the scientific community, commercial entities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - stakeholders often divided by differing worldviews, goals and agendas.

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First IDIOM Results Featured in a New Springer Book on Geospatial Web Technology

idiom — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:46:17 +0000

The sample chapter of The Geospatial Web, a new edited volume in Springer’s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing series, documents the significant progress in IDIOM interface technology and is available for download in PDF format. A screenshot of the Climate Change Collaboratory’s current prototype provides a first glimpse of knowledge planets, the new interface metaphor that is central to IDIOM’s aim of integrating geospatial and semantic topologies.

This book describes a wide range of information services built on top of geobrowsers. The role of contextual knowledge in shaping the emerging network society receives particular attention. The IDIOM project extracts such contextual knowledge automatically by processing Web documents, user profiles and other electronic sources to identify relevant content for its collaborative platforms.

In addition to the mentioned sample chapter on “Media Platforms for Managing Geotagged Knowledge Repositories“, the book’s Web site provides the table of contents, preface and foreword, 25 chapter abstracts, and author biographies.

Citation

Arno Scharl, Klaus Tochtermann (Eds.): The Geospatial Web - How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society. Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series. London: Springer (2007).

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Survey on Geospatial Information Services

idiom — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:16:15 +0000

The IDIOM team invites you to participate in a survey on geospatial information services - i.e., applications based on geospatial platforms such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth, and Microsoft Live Local. The online questionnaire investigates the usage, acceptance and desired functionality of such services. The first 100 participants can win a Fujitsu Siemens Pocket LOOX N100 navigation system. This study is part of a broader framework to investigate new visual interfaces for creating, accessing and analyzing electronic content.

Link to the Questionnaire
http://www.idiom.at/geo-info

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FIT-IT Award Ceremony | 3rd Prize for IDIOM

idiom — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:20:21 +0000

On January 16th, the best 2006 FIT-IT Research Proposals were presented in Vienna. The festive event at the former Austrian Stock Exchange introduced outstanding projects in five program lines: Embedded Systems, Semantic Systems and Services, Systems on Chip, Visual Computing and Trust in IT Systems. Facing strong competition from a total of 18 submissions in the ‘Semantic Systems and Services’ category, IDIOM has been awarded the 3rd prize. The awards were presented by Andreas Reichhardt from the Austrian Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT), as well as Toni Innauer, Gold medalist in the 1980 Winter Olympics and current Nordic Sports Director at the Austrian Skiing Association.

FIT-IT Award

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PhD Student Position: Computational Methods (Filled)

idiom — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 09:50:36 +0000

A full-time position for a doctoral student is available at the Research Institute for Computational Methods of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. The responsibilities of the position comprise the development of algorithms and software components - e.g. document clustering, similarity and redundancy metrics, diffusion models, visualization algorithms, semantic topologies and information landscapes. For further details, please refer to:

Job Announcement (German)

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Sequential Probability Models for Relationship Extraction

scharl — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 17:26:38 +0000

We are looking for a student with sound programming skills, preferably in Python and/or Java, and a background in statistics interested in writing an undergraduate thesis in the area of natural language processing and text mining (to be supervised either at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration or Graz University of Technology). For generating and structuring its knowledge base, IDIOM requires algorithms to automatically identify and tag relations between information entities. Thus the aims of this thesis are:

Identification of weaknesses in the current approach based on trigger phrases,
Improvement of the existing approach by applying a Sequential Probability Model,
Evaluation of the performance of the refined architecture.

The developed methodology will help to improve crucial parts of IDIOM’s core architecture. Thus, final results will be needed around August 2007. An excellent thesis completed within this timeframe will be rewarded with a bonus between 300 and 1,000 EUR.

Thesis-SeqPM.pdf

Contact: Dr. Albert Weichselbraun
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien
Institut für Informationswirtschaft
Augasse 2-6, A-1090 Wien
albert.weichselbraun@wu-wien.ac.at
Tel: 43-1-31336-5229

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