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Technology for “Data Journalism” activities

Active project

The project is aimed at designing and implementing technologies for data-driven journalism activities

In the modern digital age methodologies for professional Big Data analytics represent a strategic necessity to make information resources available to professional journalists and media producers in a more effective and efficient way and enabling new forms of production like data driven journalism. The challenge lies in the ability of collecting, connecting, analysing and presenting heterogeneous content streams accessible through different sources, such as digital TV, the Internet, news agencies, social networks and media archives, and published through different media modalities, such as audio, speech, text and video, in an organic and semantics-driven way.

 

This project defines and implements components and systems for professional information services that address these challenges with a uniform and holistic approach. At the core of the approach there is a set of artificial intelligence techniques and advanced statistical tools to automate tasks such as information extraction and multimedia content analysis targeted at discovering semantic links between resources, providing users with text, graphics and video news organized according to their individual interests. The system allows to define customized search profiles that are automatically and dynamically updated with the relevant contents found in the monitored information sources, which include Web feeds, television channels and specialized circuits such as the Eurovision News Exchange Network (EVN), or legacy archives.

 

More recently, starting from 2016, the project (in collaboration with Rai Digital) focused on identifying an end-to-end workflow for data driven journalism. Such a workflow foresees the design, implementation and the integration of fundamental components related to the data refining, to the data analysis (maths-statistics), to the structured and machine-readable creation of the story, open data management and advanced visualisation.

 

Awards

Premio Confindustria ICMT 2010 – Media Driven Convergence

Premio Giovanni Giovannini Nostalgia di Futuro 2010

References

Sabino Metta, Alberto Messina: An end-to-end approach for delivering data-driven stories.
IBC 14-18 September 2017

Giulia Dezi, Giorgio Dimino, Maurizio Mazzoneschi, Alberto Messina, Sabino Metta, Giuseppe Mondelli, Maurizio Montagnuolo, EBU MDN Workshop, 2016

Sabino Metta, Open Data e Data Journalism, Conferenza TAL & Open Data, 2014

Alberto Messina, Maurizio Montagnuolo, Riccardo Di Massa, Roberto Borgotallo: Hyper Media News: a fully automated platform for large scale analysis, production and distribution of multimodal news content. Multimedia Tools Appl. 63(2): 427-460 (2013)

Maurizio Montagnuolo, Alberto Messina: The RaiNewsbook: browsing worldwide multimodal news stories by facts, entities and dates. WWW (Companion Volume) 2012: 389-392

Alberto Messina, Maurizio Montagnuolo: A generalised cross-modal clustering method applied to multimedia news semantic indexing and retrieval. WWW 2009: 321-330

Alberto Messina, Roberto Borgotallo, Giorgio Dimino, Daniele Airola Gnota, Laurent Boch: ANTS: A Complete System for Automatic News Programme Annotation Based on Multimodal Analysis. WIAMIS 2008: 219-222

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