Project Information
- Stakeholder:
- Students: Mpheng Magome (UNISA), Retief Lubbe (UNISA), Promise Msomi (UP)
- Project Lead: Bolelang Sibolla
- Project Mentors: Laing Lourens
- Year: 2016/2017
Project Description
Project-Coastal NewsWatch is a project that is tasked to develop a Oceans and coastal information system management where researchers and managers have access to details of the events happening in certain areas of interest, the location of these events and the causes thereof. The Project-Coastal NewsWatch team developed a dashboard visualizing geospatial events on South African coasts; visualizing topic media based data about South Africa’s coastline and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ); applied exploratory Geospatial Visual Analytics to harvest information by their topic to aid in delivering rapid information. The Coastal Newswatch team further focused on developing the core engine for scraping and classifying news article text about coastal events and by the end of the DSIDE program the engine was running. The diagram below shows the proposed solution for the Coastal NewsWatch project;
Student Remarks
The students felt that the DSIDE vacation work program has been incredibly educational and inspirational since some of them were new to software development machine learning while others have gained more experience with their programming, python, javascript skills. The students further felt that with the rewarding experience developing their project gave them confidence to deal with the working environment, deadlines and clients.
Author: Team + Nolihle Gulwa, B Tech Journalism, Walter Sisulu University.