Semantic Systems and Visual Tools to Support Environmental Communication

Abstract

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.

Extracting Opinion Targets from Environmental Web Coverage and Social Media Streams

“…The Radar Media Criticism project develops linguistic methods for opinion target extraction and sentiment analysis. The ASAP-FP7.eu Project increases the scalability of methods to analyze and visualize big data archives [23], which are applied by the uComp.eu project to identify patterns across factual and affective knowledge [24]. The DecarboNet.eu Project builds on such patterns to investigate information diffusion processes and shed light on the emergence of collective awareness.…”

Visualizing statistical linked knowledge for decision support

“…Future work will add decision support metrics extracted from news and social media coverage to these analytic models, resulting in novel solutions for the integrated management and analysis of statistical LD. This will not only unlock significant commercial opportunities, but also enable us to better understand (and act upon) systemic issues on a society-wide scale, for example when addressing environmental problems or pursuing sustainable development goals [45].…”

“…Sabol's paper analyzes two scenarios (search and analysis over LOD, analysis of scientific publications), describes the underlying workflow, and the resulting visualizations implemented in the extensions of the Visualization Wizard tool. The framework presented in this article is based on a Multiple Coordinated View (MCV) architecture to synchronise multiple visualizations [45]. 8 This approach addresses several challenges identified in the Semantic DSS study [2].…”

“…monthly, weekly or daily data points), their provenance, or statistical tests that are needed to validate the underlying models. To combine this heterogeneous data into meaningful visualizations, visual tools need to use MCV or similar design patterns to synchronize multiple visualizations [45].…”

Application Design and Engagement Strategy of a Game with a Purpose for Climate Change Awareness

“…The Media Watch on Climate Change (Scharl et al, 2016;Scharl et al, 2013) is a content aggregator on climate change and related environmental issues, publicly available at www.ecoresearch.net/climate. It not only provided the keywords for the polarity assessment task mentioned above, but also was used by the Earth Hour team to monitor the online coverage before, during and after the event.…”