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US Election 2008 Web Monitor - Preliminary Results from a Semantic Systems Project

Abstract

The research seminar of Prof. Scharl will introduce the "US Election 2008 Web Monitor", a Web analysis system to track the US presidential candidates' performance on the campaign trail. Weekly snapshots of Web coverage reveal regional differences and contrast the perceptions of news media, companies, bloggers and environmental organizations. Besides tracking recent developments, users can also cast their votes for their preferred candidates.

http://www.ecoresearch.net/election2008/

The project analyses the Web sites of the Fortune 1000 (the largest US corporations ranked by revenue), 50 environmental organizations, 1000 popular blogs on political issues, and international media from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week. An automated process identifies attention by counting references to a candidate. It measures sentiment towards the candidate by looking for positive and negative expressions that co-occur with these references. Keywords reflect the most important topics associated with the candidate. Automated content analysis is also used to extract geospatial context information and build a comprehensive knowledge base. Interactive visualizations allow users to access this knowledge base, showing that geobrowsers are not only suited to explore geographic features, but can also render other types of imagery such as three-dimensional "Knowledge Planets".

Biography

Prof Arno Scharl heads the Department of New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna. Prior to his current appointment, he held professorships at Graz University of Technology and the University of Western Australia. He also was a Key Researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for Knowledge Management, and a Visiting Fellow at Curtin University of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. Arno has edited a recent book on "The Geospatial Web", founded the ECOresearch Network and served as co-chair of the 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection. His current research interests focus on the integration of semantic and geospatial Web technology, content aggregation, media monitoring, virtual communities and computer-mediated collaboration.

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