Explore the Media Watch on Climate Change to track the latest news and social media coverage on climate change and related issues. The dashboard visualizes environmental information flows across news media sites, blogs, Web 2.0 platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube), environmental organizations, and Fortune 1000 companies.

Compete with other users and play the Climate Quiz, a Facebook application in the tradition of “Games with a Purpose”. Thereby you contribute to a scientific project that aims to raise awareness and share environmental knowledge. You will face two types of challenges: select correct relations between two concepts, and answer climate change related questions.

About the Project

The Climate Change Collaboratory (Triple-C) aims to strengthen the relations between environmental stakeholders who recognize the need for climate change adaptation and mitigation, but differ in their specific worldviews, goals and agendas. For this purpose, the collaboratory provides tools to manage expert knowledge as well as a context-sensitive environment for creating and editing documents in a collaborative manner.

Building upon the award-winning technology behind the Media Watch on Climate Change, the user’s semantic context is provided by a real-time synchronization framework for rendering advanced visualizations including information landscapes, geographic projections, and ontology graphs. Innovative survey instruments in the tradition of “games with a purpose” create shared meaning through collaborative ontology building, and leverage the extensive user base of social networking platforms to capture indicators of environmental attitudes, lifestyles and behaviors. Two project workshops help align Triple-C with the research activities of its associate partners, increase the project’s visibility, and foster the collaboration with leading international organizations.

www.ecoresearch.net/climate

The vision of a Geospatial Web promotes the convergence of geographic information, Internet technology and social change. Taking a step towards this vision, the Media Watch on Climate Change uses automated content analysis to extract geospatial context and build a geotagged knowledge base. The interface provides various means to interactively access this knowledge base. It shows that geobrowsers are not only suited to explore geographic features, but can also render other types of imagery such as three-dimensional Knowledge Planets.

Acquiring, managing and applying knowledge are crucial steps in addressing environmental issues effectively, and ensuring that change is conceived and implemented on both regional and society-wide scales. Over the next year, the Media Watch will be extended into an interactive “Collaboratory” that brings together the scientific community, the commercial world, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These stakeholders are often divided by differing worldviews, goals, and agendas. The collaboratory will provide matchmaking services for ad-hoc team composition, and support the day-to-day activities of online communities through content aggregation and advanced visualization services.

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Applied Environmental Education & Communication, 4(2), 2005, p199;
by Nicholas K. Gaydos & Tor H. Hough (www.aeec.org).

Environmental Online Communication is an effective survey of the ‘state of the art’ in online communications from a distinctly environmental perspective. It addresses technical, social and policy issues that challenge practitioners of environmental education and communication. It is an interdisciplinary investigation of fundamental concerns from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In a day and age when economics dictate that the environmental community must accomplish more with less in order to merely maintain the status quo, this book is filled with strategies for success. Topics covered by the book include:

• Raising Environmental Awareness
  • Improved public access to environmental information and data
  • More effective advocacy through enhancement of online fund raising, promotion, and systems usability
  • Sustainable approaches to online education, distance learning and collaboration
• Environmental Science
  • Structuring data for reuse and technologies related to sharing that data across the internet
  • Referencing information geographically using data, metadata, and maps
  • Innovative uses of distributed computing resources
• Corporate Sustainability
  • Maintenance and reuse of information systems
  • Sharing data in industry standard formats to reach the broadest audiences, for maximum impact and return on investment
• Networks and Virtual Communities
  • Creating systems that encourage social networking and use its benefits to enhance the discourse between environmental communicators
  • Using the patterns and use of internet information systems to better manage information, knowledge, projects and people

This book should age relatively gracefully and provide a source of useful references for the practitioner for at least five years. While the particular technical issues addressed within the research articles will likely be overcome as technology advances, the methodologies and designs may have a longer shelf life. Regardless, the book offers an excellent overview of the problems and potential solutions in contemporary environmental communication.

If anything, the title of the book may somewhat undersell its content. This is not just another summary of the technology ‘flavor of the day’ or a dummy’s guide to building pretty Web sites for online communication. For the most part, the academic rigor with which the material is presented and the research methods employed by the authors should satisfy even a hardened skeptic that the authors are speaking from a foundation of knowledge and not merely opinion. From this rigor, the practitioner can take examples of how metrics are used to measure success and scientific research is used to guide action and inform policy. The topics addressed cut a wide path across the landscape of problems confronting the environmental community, they
are as real as the solutions explored.

For the environmental educator and communicator, with a modest technical background, this book will not be an easy read but it will be rewarding. There is technical depth in the treatment of most subjects but not excessively so. A reader without deep understanding of the subject matter can approach the material from a more general systems perspective and take away plenty of useful insights.

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Online Bookstores

The following links allow you to order the book, access
online reviews or read the publisher’s product information:

• Amazon International
• Amazon United Kingdom
• Amazon Deutschland
• Springer Online

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Part I: Raising Environmental Awareness
Public Access to Environmental Information, Online Advocacy, and Environmental Education
01: Environmental Information Systems and the Concept of Environmental Informatics
02: Mobile Access to Environmental Information
03: EnviWeb and Environmental Web Services: Case Study of an Environmental Web Portal
04: Web Coverage of Renewable Energy
05: Online Communication for Environmental Fundraising
06: How a Small Environmental Group Uses the Web to Inform and Promote Action: A Content Analysis
07: Usability Evaluation of an Environmental Web Site and its Support of the Organization’s Mission and Goals
08: EFS Global Media Network: Exploring the Boundaries of Sustainable Education
09: An Online Community of Learners in Rural, Regional, and Remote Australia
10: Self-Assessment of Consumptive Behavior Based on Material Intensity

Part II: Environmental Science
Data Sharing, Distributed Internet Computing, and Geographically Referenced Data
11: Biodiversity and the Internet: Building and Using the Virtual World Museum
12: Climateprediction.net: A Global Community for Research in Climate Physics
13: Web Portal and Markup Language for Collaborative Environmental Research
14: Web-based Exploration of Environmental Data and Corresponding Metadata, in Particular Lineage Information
15: Sharing Environmental Maps on the Web: The Austrian EnviroMap System

Part III: Corporate Sustainability
Sustainability, Social Responsibility, and Environmental Reporting
16: System Architecture and Maintenance of the Ecoradar Web Portal
17: Environmental Investment Sites: Sector Analysis and Development of GreenMoney.at
18: How to Provide Customized Environmental Reports Properly
19: Harmonizing Document Type Definitions for Corporate Environmental Reports
20 : Environmental Information Practices in the Chemical Industry

Part IV: Networks And Virtual Communities
Online Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Trust and Credibility
21: Epistemic Communities and Online Environmental Data Systems
22: Communication Process Analysis in Virtual Communities on Sustainable Development
23: Online Tools for a Sustainable Collaborative Economy
24: CBNRM Net: From Managing Natural Resources to Managing Ecosystems, Knowledge, and People
25: Patterns of Internet Use by Coastal Managers: Results of a Survey

www.ecoresearch.net/election2008

The project paid particular attention to the editorial slant, defined as the quantity and tone of a Web site’s coverage as influenced by its editorial position. The observable volume of coverage and the expressed sentiment towards the candidates served as proxies of editorial slant. The system identified attention by determining the frequency of candidate references and measured sentiment towards the candidate by identifying positive and negative expressions that co-occur with these references. Keywords and perceptual maps summarized the most important topics associated with the candidates, placing special emphasis on environmental issues.

Related Resources

• US Election 2004 Web Monitor
• Scharl, A. and Weichselbraun, A. (2008): “An Automated Approach to Investigating the Online Media Coverage of US Presidential Elections”, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 5(1): 121-132.

Arno Scharl, Klaus Tochtermann (Eds.)
Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series
2007, London: Springer, ISBN 1-84628-826-6

Web Site | Table of Contents | Buy Online

With a Foreword by Patrick J. Hogan, Program Manager of NASA World Wind

The Geospatial Web will have a profound impact on managing knowledge, structuring workflows within and across organizations, and communicating with like-minded individuals in virtual communities. The enabling technologies for the Geospatial Web are geobrowsers such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth and Microsoft Live Local 3D. These three-dimensional platforms revolutionize the production and consumption of media products. They not only reveal the geographic distribution of Web resources and services, but also bring together people of similar interests, browsing behavior, or geographic location.

This book summarizes the latest research on the Geospatial Web’s technical foundations, describes information services and collaborative tools built on top of geobrowsers, and investigates the environmental, social and economic impacts of geospatial applications. The role of contextual knowledge in shaping the emerging network society deserves particular attention. By integrating geospatial and semantic technology, such contextual knowledge can be extracted automatically – for example, when processing Web documents to identify relevant content for customized news services.

Presenting 25 chapters from renowned international experts, this edited volume will be invaluable to scientists, students, practitioners, and all those interested in the emerging field of geospatial Web technology.

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Summary

Book Review in Applied Environmental Education & Communication, 4(2), 199.

The Internet and wireless communication networks are transforming the way society handles the explosive growth and dwindling half-life of environmentally relevant information. How can we leverage new technologies to advocate sustainability and the protection of natural ecosystems? This book presents an interdisciplinary investigation of this question, combining theoretical foundations of environmental online communication with pioneering conceptual work and case studies of successful information systems.

Environmental Online Communication addresses the transition to a knowledge-based economy, sheds light on hidden assumptions and misconceptions about environmental issues, and suggests priorities for research and policy development. This volume analyzes communicative strategies and processes from four interrelated perspectives:

• Raising Environmental Awareness
• Environmental Science
• Corporate Sustainability
• Networks & Virtual Communities

Curriculum Vitae (PDF, 638 kb)

Short Biography

Arno Scharl is the Vice President of MODUL University Vienna, where he heads the Department of New Media Technology. Prior to his current appointments, he held professorships at the University of Western Australia and Graz University of Technology, 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 Scharl completed his doctoral research and habilitation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Additionally, he holds a PhD from the University of Vienna, Department of Sports Physiology.

He has been project leader of a number of award-winning semantic systems projects including IDIOM, RAVEN and Triple-C, author of more than 130 refereed publications, and editor of two books in Springer‘s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series (The Geospatial Web, Environmental Online Communication). His current research interests focus on media monitoring and Web intelligence, human-computer interaction, and the integration of semantic and geospatial Web technology.

January 4-7, 2012
Grand Wailea Maui

This mini-track emphasizes the significant research synergies that exist between information systems and environmental management for sustainable development from an organizational as well as a technical perspective. We maintain that collaboration and cross-fertilization between these domains can be mutually beneficial and may in fact present unique, timely and socially relevant ‘real-world’ research opportunities as well as viable public sources of empirical ecological information for interdisciplinary research and application.

Accordingly, the mini-track welcomes both research articles and practitioner reports exploring technical and organizational issues that pertain to the development, implementation, and deployment of environmental decision support systems (EDSS) and environmental management information systems (EMIS) in the context of environmental management for sustainable development and Green IT. Theoretically founded papers that illustrate the application of information systems and decision technologies in environmental management for sustainable development are particularly welcomed. The mini-track is receptive to all types of research methodologies. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Sustainable development and decision making
• Emerging technologies for decision support systems (DSS) development and environmental applications (e.g., computational intelligence, service-oriented computing, web services, semantic web, artificial intelligence, agent-based computing, human computer interaction and multiple criteria decision making)
• Intelligent environmental decision support systems
• Integrated environmental modeling: issues, technologies, and case studies
• Environmental model management including model sharing and reuse
• Decision dynamics, processes, and issues in the context of multiple stakeholders
• Environmental knowledge acquisition and management
• Expert knowledge-based systems for environmental management
• Environmental Management Information Systems (EMIS) and their role in Green IT
• EDSS and EMIS design and integration
• Adoption and diffusion of decision technologies and EMIS
• Evaluation and cost/benefit analysis of EDSS and EMIS
• Environmental online communication and collaboration
• Environmental education
• Community building and social software applications
• Applications and case studies of EDSS and EMIS for sustainable development

Author Deadlines

• June 15: Submission of manuscripts. The review is double-blind; therefore, this initial submission must be without author names.
• Aug 15: Notification of Acceptance.
• Sept 15: Early Registration ends.
• Oct 15: Registration deadline for accepted papers.

Co-Chairs

Omar El-Gayar
College of Business and Information Systems
Dakota State University

PingSun Leung
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Arno Scharl
Department of New Media Technology
MODUL University Vienna