Identifying and Tracking Environmental Online Resources

Abstract

Three interrelated forces drive worldwide demand for public access to environmental information: the urgency and scope of environmental problems, the increasingly active character of civil society, and the revolution in information and communication technologies. Disseminating environmental information via the Internet, directly or via news media as intermediaries, helps enhance public knowledge and build awareness about the interdependency of ecological, economic and social issues. But locating valuable, often short-lived knowledge in the flood of information can be a daunting task. The EcoMonitor project (www.ecomonitor.net) aims to facilitate this task by building quantitative models of the production, propagation and consumption of environmental Web content. In these models, environmental ontologies serve as a central knowledge repository and provide the basis for visualizing semantic associations and geographically referenced information. This talk introduces the underlying media monitoring technology and emphasizes the importance of interactive media for managing and accessing environmental resources.