Media Watch on Climate Change

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The Media Watch on Climate Change (MWCC) is a visual analytics and knowledge co-creation environment developed in WP3 of DecarboNet. It allows users to track and discuss emerging trends in the public dialog, and to better understand the social perceptions of environmental topics. The Web portal is publicly accessible at www.ecoresearch.net/climate, providing access to a continuously updated archive of news and social media content that reflects the public climate and energy debate.

The portal’s analytical portfolio not only provides customized information services for citizens, but also important insights for policy makers, NGOs and other environmental stakeholders. The MWCC helps these stakeholders to develop better strategies for engaging audiences, guides their communication and public outreach campaigns, and increases the effectiveness of communication-related decision making processes.

An important part of the work in WP3 has been the development of visual analytics tools to better understand the context of Web coverage by establishing connections between named entities (persons, organizations, and locations), based on references to these entities in the MWCC knowledge repository.

 

EnergyUse

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EnergyUse is Decarbonet online community for sharing real-life experiences on the energy consumption of typical appliances, for energy experts or not!

The electricity monitors provided by Green Energy Options can be a powerful instrument to transform everyone into an energy expert. By installing them, people can compare the consumption of similar appliances, test different settings to perform daily activities like doing the laundry, hoovering, etc. They can also assess the efficiency of changes in energy behaviour.

EnergyUse is the place where this knowledge can be shared and spread to the world!

Users can navigate discussions by tags associated to appliances or contexts of energy usage (e.g., working in the office, breakfast). Discussions are open to everyone, but users of energy-monitoring devices from Green Energy Options, can also view the electricity consumption of specific devices and appliances, or of their entire households, and compare with the community’s average.

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Visit EnergyUse.eu and join the community!

 

 

 

 

 

Social Media Application (D3.1)

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The Climate Challenge, a social media application available at www.ecoresearch.net/climate-challenge, aims to provide an engaging way to help people learn more about Earth’s climate, test their climate knowledge against others’, and promote the adoption of sustainable lifestyle choices. Measuring the distribution of opinions among citizens in a monthly prediction task, for example, will shed light on collective awareness processes and represents a first step in harnessing and focusing the wisdom of the crowd in ways that benefit society – such as when making tough choices in the face of a high degree of uncertainty.

To ensure compatibility with a wide range of platforms, T3.1 has chosen a generic HTML5 approach to address desktop and mobile users alike. The game uses a flexible authentication framework that supports a direct user registration or logins via existing Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts.

Download Deliverable D3.1

Content Acquisition Services

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The extensible Web Retrieval Toolkit (eWRT) has been extended via the DecarboNet project to support the consortium in various data collection tasks. In addition to retrieving data from social networks (like Facebook or Twitter), it provides helper classes for effective caching and data management. Start by downloading the latest version from Github and by reading the documentation at Read The Docs.

The webLyzard_api is another central building block that halped to connect the researchers of the consortium. It provides a client for Recognyze (named entity recognition and resolution), and a class for parsing its XML-format.

Information Extraction Demos and Services

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Information Extraction Demos and Services 

We provide a number of GATE–based tools as both demos and web services, comprising

  • ClimateMeasure: extracts useful indicators of climate change such as “energy use”, “carbon pollution”, etc. for particular locations, together with measurable effects such as percentages, measurements etc. and the relevant dates.
  • ClimaPinion: aims to annotate documents with terms and sentiment related to climate change. Sentiment is classified into positive, negative and neutral polarity, as well as more fine-grained emotions such as fear, anger, joy etc. There are versions for both English and German.
  • Mention Disambiguation: aims to annotate user mentions in tweets according to their status as people, locations or organisations.
  • Earth Hour Tracker: monitors Twitter to build easily digestible snapshots of how people feel about the topics being discussed in relation to Earth Hour 2016, which was held on the 19th of March 2016.

Utility Toolkit

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A paper tool to engage families with energy savings.