The
European Commission's Joint Research Centre
(JRC) has developed a number of news aggregation and analysis
systems to support EU institutions and Member State organisations.
The
three Web Portals
NewsBrief,
NewsExplorer
and MedISys
are publicly accessible and attract up to 1,2 Million hits per
day. The system was initially developed as an in-house
application for the European Commission’s Directorate General
Communication (DG COMM) to enhance their
manual media monitoring and press cutting services. Since then,
EMM has become a crucial instrument in the daily work of almost
all Commission services and many other public organisations. EMM
is the news gathering engine behind a number of applications.
EMM monitors the live web, i.e. the part of the
web that has ever changing content, such as news sites, discussion
sites and publications. All applications are developed, maintained
and run by the JRC.
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The
public web application NewsBrief
shows the hottest topics discussed during the last
few minutes and hours across multiple news sources from
around the world in 60 languages. Updated every ten minutes,
the site groups related news, shows timelines and displays
the biggest stories first.
News
by subject
NewsBrief
categorises all news into hundreds of customer-oriented
subject domains and according to the countries mentioned
in the articles. Users can opt to see only news falling
into specific subjects or concerning countries of
their choice.
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Customising
the view of the news and tools to produce newsletters
Users can customise their view of the news by filtering
the news by language and by selecting specific news sources.
Registered organisations
can additionally use the Rapid News Service RNS to further
filter the news and to produce their own newsletters by
grouping news items and by dragging and dropping them in
an easy-to-use interface. With a simple click,
email or PDF versions can be sent to defined user groups.
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Daily
news summary
At
the end of each day and for each of 19 languages, all news
articles talking about the same event or subject are grouped
into clusters and displayed by cluster size. Users can see
the people, organisations and locations mentioned most in
today’s news. A map shows where today’s events
happened. The calendar allows to read about past events.
Collecting
information about people, organisations and countries
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To
a large extent, news is about people, organisations and
countries. NewsExplorer keeps track of who gets mentioned
where and how often, who gets mentioned with which other
persons or countries, etc. Up to 170 multilingual spelling
variants for the same person have been detected automatically
so that users can search for information about persons
independently of the name spelling. Quotations by or about
people are also displayed. The database contains information
on close to 700,000 names, extracted and aggregated from
tens of thousands of articles every day written in 19
languages.
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Linking related news across 19 languages
The
perspective on individual issues often differs from one
country to the next. Seeing related news coming from different
countries or written in different languages next to each
other can be very informative. Using unique technology,
NewsExplorer automatically detects related news clusters
across languages and allows users - with one simple click
- to access foreign language news about the same subject
or event. For languages spoken in more than one country
(e.g. English, German or French), users can additionally
opt to read the news produced in only one of these countries.
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Detecting
trends over time
Each
day’s news clusters are automatically linked to the
related news of previous days and months. Timelines show
developments over time and allow users to jump to the origin
or to peaks of each story. Separate sections displaying
news stories that started in the last week or in the last
month allow users to get up to date with recent developments.
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Medical
Information System
The
Medical Information System MedISys
displays only those articles with interest to Public Health,
grouped by disease or disease type. It analyses the news
and warns users with automatically generated alerts.
Web
Intelligence for Medical Emergencies
MedISys is
an internet monitoring and analysis system developed at
the JRC in collaboration with EC Directorate General SANCO
to rapidly identify potential threats to the public health
using information from the internet. These threats
include the outbreak of Communicable Diseases, risks linked
to Chemical and Nuclear accidents and Terrorist Attacks,
i.e. events that could have a widespread impact on the health
of the European Community.
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MedISys
continuously monitors about 400 specialist medical sites
plus all the generic EMM news, i.e. over 10000 RSS feeds and HTML pages sites from 3750 generic news portals
and 20 commercial news wires in altogether 60 languages.
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Filtering:
Articles collected are grouped into hundreds of categories
(e.g. diseases, symptoms, chemical agents, etc.) based on
pre-defined keyword combinations.
Analysis:
The system keeps track of statistics for each of
the categories and uses this to identify breaking news,
i.e. a sudden increase of articles on any given subject.
This helps to suppress news noise (stories
that are regularly in the news) and to focus on stories
with a poor signal.
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Visualisation:
Trends are visually presented in graphs. The location of
events is highlighted on maps.
Notification:
Upon request, users will receive email or SMS messages notifying
them of breaking news stories or of new articles about any
of the diseases, etc. RSS feeds for all categories are available
for integration in third-party environments.
Public/restricted
access: On the public site http://medisys.newsbrief.eu/,
all users get access to MedISys. Specialist Public Health
organisations can request access to the restricted site,
which offers more functionality, more categories and more
news sources.
Customisable:
Users can select the languages and news sources they want
to see. Registered users additionally get access to the
EMM tool NewsDesk, which allows them to select
sources, compile newsletters and alert colleagues via email
or SMS.
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EMM-Labs
This new web service provides access to some of the new advanced analysis systems resulting from information retrieval from EMM data.
Country and Theme information sheets
Show automatically generated statistics about articles reporting on countries and themes in a number of different visualization mechanims including: World Map, Charts and Tables.
Violent Events and Disasters
Real time monitoring of automatically extracted violent events geo-located and displayed on maps of the world, both in a browser and in Google Earth.
Social Networks
Visualization using graph network techniques of automatically generated social networks taken from the news extracting meeting, support, criticise and familiy relationships.
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