SENSE4US presented at “Leibniz meets Parliament” event, 3rd September 2015, Düsseldorf, Germany

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Created on Tuesday, 13 October 2015 15:36

“Leibniz meets Parliament” is a one-day event that frequently takes place within German parliaments. The objective is to present and discuss the current research of the Leibniz institutions to decision-makers, and to make use of the research results in daily work life situations. Hence the Leibniz group organizes the events and the last one took place in Düsseldorf, in the State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia on the 3rd of December 2014. With a couple of weeks forerun all members of the parliament received a cover letter including a list of the topics that were offered by the researchers of the participated Leibniz institutes. In total six MPs requested a meeting regarding the topic “Can Open Data and Twitter benefit decision-making?” proposed by Timo Wandhöfer, our project partner from GESIS.

As state of the art technology Dr. Wandhöfer presented the SENSE4US toolbox with the focus on the last current development of SentiCircles, from the Open University. This tool allows a “different view” regarding a bunch of tweets. Starting with a Twitter collection (e.g. search-term “electric car”) the user gets a list of core terms (e.g. companies, technologies, users, etc.) combined with the Twitter users’ sentiment. A second level shows all of the related terms within the bunch of collected tweets.

The general outcome of interviews is that Twitter analysis and Open Data are becoming more and more relevant data sources for the information process. But it is highly relevant to simplify the user interface, combine different filter options and make the tools’ service as transparent as possible. Concerning Open Data more relevant data need to be published and interlinked. The proposed SENSE4US approach of making use of the Linked Open Data cloud (e.g. the machine-readable version of Wikipedia) is seen as trendsetting.