IDIOM Media Watch on Climate Change

06 June 2007, 7:08am

Geospatial Web Portal for Communicating Climate Change


Award Winner of the 3D Visualization Grand Challenge 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth

(Berkeley, 06 June 2007). A European team of researchers today announced the official launch of the Media Watch on Climate Change, an award-winning Geospatial Web application. Google, NASA, ESRI and other technology leaders are sponsoring the 3D Visualization Grand Challenge and will be attending tomorrow's awards ceremony held at the University of California at Berkeley (www.isde5.org).

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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For more information, contact:

Prof. Arno Scharl
Know-Center & Graz University of Technology Inffeldgasse 21a, A-8010 Graz, Austria
(e) scharl@ecoresearch.net
(w) http://kmi.tugraz.at/
(w) http://www.know-center.at/
(w) http://www.geospatialweb.com/

Acknowledgement: The Media Watch on Climate Change is part of IDIOM (Information Diffusion across Interactive Online Media; www.idiom.at), a two-year research project funded by the FIT-IT Semantic Systems program
(www.fit-it.at)of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) in cooperation with the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The project is jointly pursued by Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (Research Institute for Computational Methods, Institute for Tourism and Leisure Studies), Graz University of Technology (Knowledge Management Institute) and three industry partners (Gentics, Austria.info and Prisma Solutions).

www.ecoresearch.net/climate

Geo: International