Semantic Systems and Visual Tools to Support Environmental Communication

Arno Scharl,David Herring,Michael Fols,Albert Weichselbraun,Ruslan Kamolov,Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel,Daniel Fischl,Walter Rafelsberger

doi:10.1109/jsyst.2015.2466439

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.

Highlights

P UBLIC concern about climate-related changes has risen, but only a small percentage of citizens are taking action to reduce their carbon footprint [2]
This paper presents methods to acquire, analyze, and visualize three types of context information
The visual analytics platform presented in this paper allows communication professionals to explore the lexical, geospatial and relational context of information flows across these channels (Section IV), and to track success metrics such as WYSDOM, the webLyzard Stakeholder Dialog and Opinion Model (Section V)

Summary

Introduction

P UBLIC concern about climate-related changes has risen, but only a small percentage of citizens are taking action to reduce their carbon footprint [2]. Among the reasons for this discrepancy are: 1) a lack of collective awareness, the widespread perception of climate change as a risk that predominantly impacts geographically and temporally distant places; and 2) a lack of personal efficacy, the belief that one’s own actions will not make a difference [2]. The presented work has been conducted as part of the research projects DecarboNet (www.decarbonet.eu), Pheme (www.pheme.eu) and ASAP (www.asap-fp7.eu)

Methods

Results

Conclusion