Semantic systems and visual tools to analyze climate change communication

Given the intense attention that environmental topics such as climate change attract in news and social media coverage, key questions are how different stakeholders perceive observable threats and policy options, how public media react to new scientific insights, and how journalists present climate science knowledge to the public. This presentation will demonstrate the Web intelligence platform [1] to address these questions, including knowledge extraction and visualization techniques to explore the lexical and geospatial context of online coverage. The examples stem from the Media Watch on Climate Change [2], the Climate Resilience Toolkit [3] and the NOAA Media Watch the 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 novel communication success metrics beyond bipolar assessments of sentiment

Maximizing the Customer Delivered Value with Web-based Mass Information Systems

This paper describes a research framework focusing on conceptual, marketing-oriented aspects of Web-based Mass Information Systems (WMIS) analysis and design with a special emphasis on the integration of adaptive system components for supporting negotiations, market segmentation, targeted direct marketing initiatives, and transaction processing. Methods to gather and analyze customer preferences and expectations as well as to visualize the actual behavior of WMIS users are identified in order to maximize the customer delivered value in global electronic markets

Cooperative Development of Web-based Mass Information Systems

This paper describes a research framework which led to the development of industry-specific reference models for mass information systems (mass IS). As one of the primary means of standardized communication, these models provide an invaluable opportunity to strengthen the ties between academic research and industry practice. By avoiding structural inconsistencies and mistakes, companies are able to improve the quality of their systems, usually at low costs compared to acquiring the required know-how from external commercial organizations. Researchers, on the other hand, are able to test hypotheses about the success factors of mass IS in different industries. For this reason the extended World Wide Web Design Technique (eW3DT) was developed and - in cooperation with renowned Austrian and German companies—applied to a number of Web- based prototypes

Evolutionary Web Development - Automated Analysis, Adaptive Design, and Interactive Visualization of Commercial Web Information Systems

Evolutionary Web Development examines the evolution of Web information systems, paying particular attention to the emergent attributes of electronic markets. It identifies four categories of architecture and demonstrates their virtues and limitations: static, interactive, adaptive, and agent-mediated systems. Advanced systems require the developer to truly understand the needs and preferences of customers. As well as such personal attributes, the availability of empirical data about the structure and content of Web information systems is a precondition for their effective assessment. Most previous evaluation frameworks rely on expert judgements. Arno Scharl extends and complements these efforts, and presents an automated and scalable approach to Web assessment. He emphasizes the role of feedback in an iterative cycle of design, implementation, usage, and analysis. Evolutionary Web Development blends a strong theoretical background with state-of-the-art research and several industry analyses. This makes it a valuable resource for researchers and students, which will also be welcomed by practitioners looking for effective methods and tools

Climate Change Engagement: Results of a Multi-Task Game with a Purpose

Addressing the challenge of engaging people with climate change, this paper sheds light on the Climate Challenge, a crowdsourcing application in the tradition of games with purpose that relies on different strategies for informing and inviting users to adopt sustainable lifestyle choices. Towards building an extensive perspective of engagement, we statistically analyse specific game strategies based on users’ participation and performance, and build a panorama of users’ positioning in a behaviour change process. Preliminary results suggest features that should be considered in a Climate Challenge design roadmap

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

The Climate Challenge is an online application in the tradition of games with a purpose that combines practical steps to reduce carbon footprint with predictive tasks to estimate future climate-related conditions. As part of the Collective Awareness Platform, the application aims to increase environmental literacy and motivate users to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. It has been deployed in conjunction with the Media Watch on Climate Change, a publicly available knowledge aggregator and visual analytics system for exploring environmental content from multiple online sources. This paper presents the motivation and goals of the Climate Challenge from an interdisciplinary perspective, outlines the application design including the types of tasks built into the application, discusses incentive mechanisms, and analyses the pursued user engagement strategies

Quantitive Evaluation of Web site Content and Structure

Describes an approach automatically to classify and evaluate publicly accessible World Wide Web sites. The suggested methodology is equally valuable for analyzing content and hypertext structures of commercial, educational and nonprofit organizations. Outlines a research methodology for model building and validation and defines the most relevant attributes of such a process. A set of operational criteria for classifying Web sites is developed. The introduced software tool supports the automated gathering of these parameters, and thereby assures the necessary ``critical mass'' of empirical data. Based on the preprocessed information, a multi-methodological approach is chosen that comprises statistical clustering, textual analysis, supervised and nonsupervised neural networks and manual classification for validation purposes

Metadata Enriched Visualization of Keywords in Context

This paper presents an interactive, synchronized and metadata enriched implementation of the Word Tree metaphor, which is an interactive visualization technique to show Keywords-in-Context (KWIC). Embedded into a Web intelligence platform focusing on climate change coverage, it provides users with a tool to better understand the usage of terms in large document collections. One of the novelties is the implementation of filters for the Word Tree, which shifts the focus of attention directly onto significant phrases, instead of punctuation or fill-words, inherent to natural language usage

Topic Wizard - Interactive Visual Tool for Defining and Disambiguating Topics via Regular Expressions

The Topic Wizard presented in this paper is a new interactive tool that supports the definition and revision of topics in form of regular expressions, combining a dialog for prefix and suffix extension with a word tree-based representation of phrases for restricting the query to specific expressions. The examples stem from the Media Watch on Climate Change, a public Web portal based on the webLyzard Web intelligence platform that aggregates environmental stakeholder communication from multiple online sources