Project Information
- Partner: CSIR
- Students: Luqmaan Hassim (UP), Chris Zitha (UL), Michaela Shilton (UP)
- Project Lead: Bolelang Sibolla
- Project Mentors: Laing Lourens
- Year: 2017/2018
Project Description
Coastal News Watch was tasked with developing a system that allows researchers and managers to access details of the events, including certain areas of interest, the location of these events and the causes thereof. This system may later be integrated with the Oceans and Coastal Information Management System (OCIMS - https://www.ocims.gov.za/). The Coastal News Watch team developed what we have called ‘dashboards 2.0’, by using Cesium to visualize geospatial events on South African coasts, based on topic media data about South Africa’s coastline and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Articles are first labelled according to (coastal) relevance and then further labelled in line with OCIMS thematic areas: Marine Domain Awareness, Marine Spatial Planning, Water Quality, Sea State, Coastal Hazard, and Harmful Algal Bloom. The Coastal News Watch team further developed the core engine for scraping by the relevance of the URL itself based on predefined coastal related keywords. The team has also started exploratory trend analysis.
