Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In Chap. 1 , Ploch approaches the information overload challenge in the context
of online news. Nowadays, it is doubtful that there is any major newspaper that
does not maintain an online portal. Apart from saving costs that occur for printing
and distributing traditional newspapers, the main advantage of distributing news
online is that readers can be reached almost immediately. On one hand, the wide
range of news brings many bene
nd comprehensive
information and capture news from different perspectives. On the other hand, the
increasing amount of news material complicates their handling, which requires
tools for facilitating consumption of news articles. In addition to reporting facts,
news articles also contain opinions which may be very important for helping
readers making decisions and for public
ts to readers;
they can
gures to control their perception in the
media. Analyzing the large number of news articles manually is next to impossible.
Ploch presents how online readers of newspapers can be offered a structured
overview of news. Focusing on news published in the German language, she
illustrates how news articles can be categorized by topic and time of publication. In
addition, she illustrates means to track the development of news events over time
and to track opinions and resonance in the media about popular topics, persons, or
organizations.
Besides professionally edited content on news portals, various alternative
information sources exist on the web. Social networks and services like Twitter
offer a wealth of information as thousands of users publicly exchange information.
These so-called microblogs give voice to billions of people who often use this
technology to express their opinions about brands, products, and persons. Ana-
lyzing these opinions can be of high value for companies since knowing where a
brand is popular can be an important lead for the marketing strategy. Esiyok and
Albayrak discuss in Chap. 2 how tweets can be analyzed to identify users
opinions
about brands and present an application that displays the popularity of brands in
speci
'
c locations on a map. This helps to identify trends and trendsetters and can
offer aid for marketing decisions.
Chapter 3 focuses on a speci
c type of information portal. Addressing the trend
that users more often use the internet for informing themselves about any types of
topics, healthcare providers and governments started setting up education cam-
paigns on the WWW. Although healthcare providers have speci
c interest in
providing health information services to all their clients, immigrants have been
identi
ts less from existing
healthcare systems since language and cultural barriers prevent them from using
existing prevention services. Plumbaum et al. present an online health assistant that
consists of three parts: (1) a multilingual health information assistant, (2) a cooking
assistant, and (3) a virtual trainer. These assistants present a comprehensive
approach to support people for healthier living by giving them information about
health topics, supporting healthier eating and getting enough exercise.
In Chap. 4 , Gunadi and Albayrak address the information overload challenge in
the workspace environment. They argue that the bigger a company, the more
complex is their IT infrastructure and, consequently, more resources exist where
employees can store information. Examples include companies
ed as a vulnerable population cohort
that bene
'
web server,
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