Arwin van der Zwan
19 September 2013
This week CLARIN-NL project PoliMedia has won the prestigious international LinkedUp Challenge at the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva. The LinkedUp Challenge is a competition for groundbreaking tools and applications that analyse and/or integrate open web data for educational purposes.
The winning PoliMedia search engine facilitates the study of media coverage of parlementary debates in the Netherlands. PoliMedia was praised for its user friendly interface and its innovative linking of parlementary minutes with newspaper articles and radio broadcasts.
More information on the award ceremony can be found here.
About PoliMedia
Students of media and communication sciences study the role of media in our society. They frequently search through media archives to manually select items that cover a certain event. When this is done for large time spans and across media-outlets, this task can however be challenging and laborious. Therefore, up until now the focus of students has been on manual and qualitative analyses of newspaper coverage. PoliMedia aims to stimulate and facilitate large-scale, cross-media analysis of the coverage of political events. We focus on the meetings of the Dutch parliament, and provide automatically generated links between the transcripts of those meetings, newspaper articles, including their original lay-out on the page, and radio bulletins. Via the portal at www.polimedia.nl students will be able to search through the debates and find related media coverage in two media-outlets, facilitating a more efficient search process and qualitative analyses of the media coverage. Furthermore, the generated links are available via a SPARQL endpoint, allowing quantitative analyses with complex, structured queries that are not covered by the search functionality of the portal, thus challenging the student to go across the academic borders and enter fields that previously have been neglected.