Exploring Environmental News Via Geospatial Interfaces and Virtual Globes

Users of online news services have discovered geospatial interfaces as an effective platform to identify and access relevant information. An increasing number of applications therefore use maps to specify queries and present results. This chapter discusses such applications with a special focus on integrating geospatial and semantic reference systems. It outlines how geospatial context can be extracted automatically from large repositories of unstructured text and presents the Media Watch on Climate Change, a public Web portal that aggregates, filters and visualizes environmental Web content from 150 Anglo-American news media sites. Among the key components of the Web portal are Knowledge Planets — Java applets that generate three-dimensional topographies based on semantic similarity and thereby demonstrate how the NASA World Wind platform can be used as a generic image rendering engine to project various types of imagery.

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