CRiTERIA is an innovative, EU-funded research project that uses semantic technologies in conjunction with interactive visualisation techniques to empower European border agencies and other stakeholders within the European Union. Its visual analytics dashboard and underlying open-access intelligence platform capture publicly available content from various government sources, NGOs, corporate websites, community platforms and social media channels. It ensures a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the public debate, including real-time insights into migration-related issues, perceived problems and emerging events such as public protests. Using the platform, stakeholders can respond proactively to emerging events and identify potential risks.
The dashboard helps to analyse communication patterns across online channels, including various customisation options to tailor the interface to the current task and workflow. Identified trends and patterns in Web data alert users to upcoming events and present extracted metadata in various ways — for example, information flows, perceptions and associations or the geographic distribution of search results. These capabilities can help users identify patterns in their data that they may not have seen otherwise, thereby supporting their decision-making.
Recent innovations developed as part of the CRiTERIA project include vector-based information retrieval operations over multi-modal content assets, a user-driven content rating system, cross-lingual extensions to cover 10+ new content languages, event integration via an adaptive graph subsystem, as well as improved video annotation and playback capabilities. The following screenshot showcases some of these innovations using a query on migration in a European context. The centre area of the screen reflects the systems’ story detection capabilities based on aggregated content and extracted metadata between 18 March and 4 April 2023. The right sidebar includes three interactive widgets showing the embedded video playback feature, a geographic map and a colour-coded tag cloud to show the faceted search results.
webLyzard technology
webLyzard technology is an Austrian SME founded in 2008 with a focus on Web intelligence and visual analytics research. The unique capabilities of its big data platform are based on a strong R&D track record (Horizon 2020, FP7, Google DNI, FFG) and the extensive expertise of its founders in the fields of knowledge extraction and visualization, human-computer interaction, and the integration of geospatial and semantic Web technologies. The webLyzard technology platform supports a wide range of use cases including data-driven brand communication and success metrics, news data value chains and semantic search for corporate publishing.
Banner image by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash.
