News and Social Media Monitoring To Assess the Impact of Science Communication

This presentation will demonstrate a novel approach to aggregating and visualizing online information. The webLyzard Web intelligence platform (www.weblyzard.com) uses semantic technologies to accurately identify and track topical trends in both social and mainstream media. An interactive dashboard visualizes information flows and reveals content patterns across stakeholders, assisting science agencies and organizations in assessing and evolving their online communication strategies.

Showcase. The Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate) is a public showcase of this technology. It tracks the latest online media coverage on climate change and visualizes environmental information flows across news media sites, blogs, Web 2.0 platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube), environmental organizations, and Fortune 1000 companies.

Technology. The advanced information exploration interface of the Media Watch on Climate Change requires accurate annotation services that enrich documents with geospatial, semantic and temporal tags. Such annotations describe complex relations, which are best understood in graphical form. For this purpose, the portal synchronizes geographic maps, tag clouds, keyword graphs as well as two- and three-dimensional information landscapes. These visualizations help analyts to understand both the context and impact of digital content – processing their search queries and showing the most relevant documents in a specific regional context, for example, or comparing the online coverage about a science agency by different stakeholders groups.