Rationale

Public institutions, private companies and NGOs and civil societies increasingly rely on fast and accurate information both to monitor media coverage of policy areas and to respond to unexpected events. Some services and agencies are setting up early warning response systems for crisis management.

Policy monitoring and assessment is helped by gauging public response and the news. Citizens and civil society organisations can better monitor issues of concern and the activities of public institutions with customisable news services. Statistics about news trends provide rapid feedback to anybody who may be concerned with the impact of events, policies etc.

It is more and more important to be able to access information services that rely on an impartial aggregation of sources and are free from commercial, national or political interests.

Data mining techniques now allow automatic extraction of names, places and topics and can identify associations across languages from reports, news, social networks etc. This can provide valuable and unbiased insights, and identify trends.

Africa News Monitor

Africa News Monitor (ANM - anm.apkn.org) is be based on data mining technologies developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). These techniques are currently being deployed in the form of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM, press.jrc.it). As with EMM, the system will gather on-line news reports from news portals world wide, in different languages, analyse and classify the content of the reports, aggregate the information, issue alerts and produce intuitive visual presentations of the information found.

Features

ANM NewsBrief

The ANM NewsBrief will show the hottest topics reported during the last few minutes and hours across multiple news sources from around the world focusing particularly on African sources or Africa related sources. Constantly updated, the site will group related news, show timelines and display the biggest stories first.

It will also be possible to browse news by subject as all news is automatically categorised into hundreds of customer-oriented (and customer defined) subject domains and according to the countries mentioned in the articles. Users will be able to choose to see only news falling into specific subjects or concerning countries of their choice.

Information about people, organisations and countries

All associated information, people and organisations mentioned, and possibly location information will be displayed alongside the articles. The stories themselves can be viewed on a map.

The system will keep track of co-occurrences of people and organisations in the news and use this information to build networks of people than can be explored graphically. The system does take into consideration multilingual spelling variants for the same person so that users can search for information about persons independently of the name spelling. The system will update its list of known entities in the news on a regular basis from a resource provided (and updated) by the JRC. It will also be possible to provide a ‘custom’ list in addition to the main resource.

Linking related news across 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, Africa News Monitor will 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 or French), users can additionally opt to read the news produced in only one of these countries.

Detecting trends over time

News clusters will be 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.

To do:

Currently the ANM Portal (anm.apkn.org) news comes from RSS feeds of the demo site developed by JRC of the European Commission. The JRC will soon create a new dedicated server on which we will begin to “Africanise”, This will begin with:

• dividing the news sources in “from Africa”, news sources and “about Africa” so that it will be possible to monitor both what the news from Africa newspaper and magazines and the news about africa from newspapers and magazines from Europe, Asia, etc;
• Adding and maintaining sources with specific attention to Africa;
• Adding/changing category definitions with specific attention to Africa agenda and priorities.