Description

The goal of SYNC3 is to create a framework for structuring, rendering more accessible and enabling collaborative creation of the extensive user-provided content that is located in personal blogs and refers to running news issues. The main obstacle for blogosphere content exploitation has been the difficulty to structure the disparate and vast information found in blog posts. On the other hand, news articles have a multitude of favourable characteristics that make their analysis easier. The pioneering concept of SYNC3 is that while the underlying semantics of news events is not studied, the news event is the most appropriate thematology atom for the task of associating user commentaries on news articles. SYNC3 can also derive relations between news events and connect them with blog post excerpts, while through sentiment analysis of these excerpts can derive user opinions that are associated to news events. The final product which combines news events and their relations and users and their opinions is the SYNC3 graph of the commentaries of blog users on current news. The graph is presented to the user through an intuitive interface which also enables the user to re-use the now structured content attached to the graph and create content collaboratively.

SYNC3 target is to apply the news domain structure derived from well-organised news portals to the unstructured domain of news comments in the blogosphere.  To achieve this, novel approaches are proposed in each of the research areas of the project advancing the State of the Art in each area and producing a number of software modules which will be integrated in a common platform that will operate as a news aggregation tool. This tool will be organizing content coming both from news portals and blogs and will allow the creation of more user generated content either by authoring new material or re-organising the links structured by SYNC3 into user generated storylines.

SYNC3 results will be immediately applicable in areas like news aggregation, blog search and aggregation, or blog community formation, to mention a few. Besides that, any application that needs automatic generation of categorization and/or transfer of categorization from a more structured to a less structured information source is likely to benefit. Therefore the potential user groups of the resulting system are:
• the wide public interested in consuming news content
• citizen journalists interested in re-organizing the news content into new storylines
• news producing organizations either with (e.g. news agencies) or without profit (e.g. news aggregators) interested in adopting  tool which will organize their news content and link it with content and opinions coming from the open blogosphere