Annotating and visualizing location data in geospatial web applications

This paper presents the IDIOM Media Watch on Climate Change (www.ecoresearch.net/climate), a prototypical implementation of an environmental portal that emphasizes the importance of location data for advanced Web applications. The introductory section outlines the process of retrofitting existing knowledge repositories with geographical context information, a process also referred to as geotagging. The paper then describes the portal's functionality, which aggregates, annotates and visualizes environmental articles from 150 Anglo-American news media sites. From 300,000 news media articles gathered in weekly intervals, the system selects about 10,000 focusing on environmental issues. The crawled data is indexed and stored in a central repository. Geographic location represents a central aspect of the application, but not the only dimension used to organize and filter content. Applying the concepts of location and topography to semantic similarity, the paper concludes with discussing information landscapes as alternative interface metaphor for accessing large Web repositories.