Aggregating to Inform

An Infrastructure for Analyzing and Understanding Global Web Events

Jerry Sheehan, Manager for Government Program DevelopmentUniversity of California at San Diego

February 2006

Visual Model of Information Distribution

The Katrina Information Experience

Formal

News Sourc

Formal News Source Informal News Source

Google Maps

Newspaper of Record RSS

Photoblogs

The Modern Life of Information

World Wide Information Resources

Information Resources for Global Web Events

Trigger for Global Web Events

Global Web Event: The Katrina Blog

Rapid Development Timeline

Multiple Delivery Modalities

Akamai: The Global Web Event Trigger

8.29.05

49% Increase in Net Usage in US

• Harvest business news being already aggregated.

• Establish workflow for efficient production of business knowledge of interest to Calit2

• Experiment with mixture of formal and informal information sources.

• Develop system for production of text to podcast.

Calit2 Partner News and Knowledge Site

Information Sources Aggregator’s Desktop Server Side Software

NetNewsWire

http://research.calit2.net/industry

62 Feeds

15 Feeds

120 Feeds197 Feeds Reviewed

Once a day/5*Week

771 Posts as of 8/16/2005

ecto

RSS Screen Saver

User’s DesktopBrowser Based

User’s Desktop

Non-Browser Based

Partner News and Knowledge Version 1.0

Work Flow for Information Production

PNK Information Aggregation Trends

• Three types of data used to provide various “vantage points” on partner news.

• Commercial News

• Blogs

• General Web

• Almost all useful data is from meta-aggregators of commercial information.

Commercial Information Sources

Blog

Web

87%

8%

5%

Aggregate to Inform Version 1.0 Toolkit

• Akamai Global Web Event Trigger

• Completed, data gathered on daily basis. Email notification.

• Tagger 2 Database for RSS Feeds

• Completed, OPML import, social bookmarking keywords, user relevancy voting.

• Blog Infrastructure and Global Web Event Workflow

• Completed, server software deployed, various tools evaluated and used.

Aggregate to Inform Version 1.0 Application Areas

• Avian Flu

• Site currently under production, feeds being added to Tagger 2.

• Calit2 Related Organizations

• Feeds identified and added to Tagger 2, site under production.

• Common Alerting Protocol

• Feeds identified and added to Tagger 2, site created and being populated, CAP-->RSS--->Email complete and functional.

Global Web Event: Information Hypothesis

Commercial Information Sources

Blog

Web

87%

8%

5%

Commercial Information Sources

Blog

Web

60%

40%

5%

Pre-Global Web Event Global Web Event