Predictive Application Tracks Global Events
April 27, 2013
Have you heard of the Global Data On Events, Location, and Tone project yet? Head on over to Foreign Policy and its article, “GDELT: What We Can Learn From The Last 200 Million Things That Happened In the World?” The article summarizes how the GDELT project tracks political events from all over the world. Similar databases exist for a particular region, but GDELT separates itself out by covering the expanse of the globe. It records events and categorize them by four different types: material conflict, material cooperation, verbal conflict, and verbal cooperation and within those categorizes the event is classified with CAMEO, a 300 category taxonomy system.
GDELT can be used to track political events and political rhetoric and from its data it can possibly predict the future and it might even be a tool for complexity theory mathematicians.
“Of course, for all the high-tech software behind its creation and its potentially far-out applications, GDELT is, at its core, a way of summarizing news coverage, and old fashioned legacy-media news coverage at that. The sources used to identify events include world news coverage from Agence France Press, the AP, BBC,Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, UPI, and the Washington Post, as well as a few more specialized outlets and Google News. Leetaru notes in his recent paper introducing the project that the increasing availability of news on the web has led to a ‘dramatic increase [of recorded events] since the beginning of the 21stcentury.’”
There are concerns for the project such as rural areas gaining as much frequency as developed areas and bringing in social media. Mainstream journalism has quality behind it, while social media is still relatively new and there is a lot of junk in it. The information needs to be gathered no matter where the source is from. The problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Whitney Grace, April 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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