Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel

Multiple coordinated views for searching and navigating Web content repositories

The advantages and positive effects of multiple coordinated views on search performance have been documented in several studies. This paper describes the implementation of multiple coordinated views within the Media Watch on Climate Change, a domain-specific news aggregation portal available at www.ecoresearch.net/climate that combines a portfolio of semantic services with a visual information exploration and retrieval interface. The system builds contextualized information spaces by enriching the content repository with geospatial, semantic and temporal annotations, and by applying semi-automated ontology learning to create a controlled vocabulary for structuring the stored information. Portlets visualize the different dimensions of the contextualized information spaces, providing the user with multiple views on the latest news media coverage. Context information facilitates access to complex datasets and helps users navigate large repositories of Web documents. Currently, the system synchronizes information landscapes, domain ontologies, geographic maps, tag clouds and just-in-time information retrieval agents that suggest similar topics and nearby locations.

Tracing Tourists by Their Digital Footprints The Case of Austria

Traditional tourism data collection includes surveys, interviews and focus groups. However, these methods are both expensive and time consuming. Moreover, there is a lag between the time of data collection and the receipt of that data for analysis. Today, almost all individuals leave digital footprints on the Internet, which can also be used for tourism research. One type of digital footprint is the photos uploaded on websites such as Flickr. The aim of this study is to determine whether the digital footprints in Flickr provide a useful indicator for tourism demand. Photos tagged with “Austria” between 2007 and 2011 were collected using Flickr API. Residents were distinguished from tourists using the data, and spatial analyses were conducted of the tourist-generated data. The results indicate that geotagged photos in Austria are more representative of actual tourist numbers at the city level than at the regional level.

From Web Intelligence to Knowledge Co-Creation: A Platform for Analyzing and Supporting Stakeholder Communication

Organizations require tools that can assess their online reputations as well as the impact of their marketing and public outreach activities. The Media Watch on Climate Change is a Web intelligence and online collaboration platform that addresses this requirement. It aggregates large archives of digital content from multiple stakeholder groups and enables the co-creation and visualization of evolving knowledge archives. Here, the authors introduce the base platform and a context-aware document editor as an add-on that supports concurrent authoring by multiple users. While documents are being edited, semantic methods analyze them on the fly to recommend related content. The system computes positive or negative sentiment automatically to provide a better understanding of third-party perceptions. The editor is part of an interactive dashboard that uses trend charts and map projections to show how often and where relevant information is published, and to provide a real-time account of concepts that stakeholders associate with a topic.

Media Watch on Climate Change -- Visual Analytics for Aggregating and Managing Environmental Knowledge from Online Sources

This paper presents the Media Watch on Climate Change, a public Web portal that captures and aggregates large archives of digital content from multiple stakeholder groups. Each week it assesses the domain-specific relevance of millions of documents and user comments from news media, blogs, Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the Web sites of companies and NGOs, and a range of other sources. An interactive dashboard with trend charts and complex map projections not only shows how often and where environmental information is published, but also provides a real-time account of concepts that stakeholders associate with climate change. Positive or negative sentiment is computed automatically, which not only sheds light on the impact of education and public outreach campaigns that target environmental literacy, but also help to gain a better understanding of how others perceive climate-related issues.

Analyzing the public discourse on works of fiction - Detection and visualization of emotion in online coverage about HBO's Game of Thrones

Highlights • “Westeros Sentinel” – a visual analytics dashboard for Game of Thrones.• Extraction of affective and factual knowledge from news and social media coverage.• Emotional categories from semantic knowledge bases.• Automated annotation services for contextualized information spaces.• Interactive visualizations to explore context features.

Semantic Systems and Visual Tools to Support Environmental Communication

Given the intense attention that environmental topics such as climate change attract in news and social media coverage, scientists and communication professionals want to know how different stakeholders perceive observable threats and policy options, how specific media channels react to new insights, and how journalists present scientific knowledge to the public. This paper investigates the potential of semantic technologies to address these questions. After summarizing methods to extract and disambiguate context information, we present visualization techniques to explore the lexical, geospatial, and relational context of topics and entities referenced in these repositories. The examples stem from the Media Watch on Climate Change, the Climate Resilience Toolkit and the NOAA Media Watch—three applications that aggregate environmental resources from a wide range of online sources. These systems not only show the value of providing comprehensive information to the public, but also have helped to develop a novel communication success metric that goes beyond bipolar assessments of sentiment.

Identifying Tourist Dispersion in Austria by Digital Footprints

Tourism data are important for destinations, especially for planning, forecasting tourism demand, marketing, measuring economic impacts and benchmarking. There are different ways to collect tourism data. Traditional methods include guest surveys and data from accommodation providers, which are time consuming and expensive. Today, everyone leaves digital footprints on the internet, which can be used as data. One such footprint is photos uploaded on photo sharing websites. The purpose of this study is to find out how representative Flickr data is in comparison to actual tourist numbers in Austria. Using Flickr API data were collected related to Austria. The tourists and residents were categorized based on their activity time span on Flickr. Polynomial regression was conducted to estimate actual tourist bed nights based on Flickr tourist numbers. The results show that Flickr data can be used as an estimation of actual tourist numbers in Austria.

Interactive visualization of emerging topics in multiple social media streams

This paper introduces an interactive news flow visualization that reveals emerging topics in dynamic digital content archives. The presented approach combines several visual metaphors and can be easily adapted to present multi-source social media datasets. In the context of this work, we discuss various methods for improving visual interfaces for accessing aggregated media representations. We combine falling blocks with bar graphs and arcs, but keep these elements clearly separated in different areas of the display. The arc metaphor is adapted and enriched with interactive controls to help users understand the datasets underlining meaning. The paper describes the implementation of the prototype and discusses design issues with a particular emphasis on visual metaphors to highlight hidden relations in digital content. We conclude with a summary of the lessons learnt and the integration of the visualization component into the Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate), a public Web portal that aggregates environmental information from a variety of online sources including news media, blogs and other social media such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Visualizing statistical linked knowledge for decision support

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.

Extraction and interactive exploration of knowledge from aggregated news and social media content

The webLyzard media monitoring and Web intelligence platform (www.webLyzard.com) presented in this paper is a generic tool for assessing the strategic positioning of an organization and the effectiveness of its communication strategies. The platform captures and aggregates large archives of digital content from multiple stakeholder groups. Each week it processes millions of documents and user comments from news media, blogs, Web 2.0 platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the Web sites of companies and NGOs, and other sources. An interactive dashboard with trend charts and complex map projections shows how often and where information is published. It also provides a real-time account of topics that stakeholders associate with an organization. Positive or negative sentiment is computed automatically, which reflects the impact of public relations and marketing campaigns.