Polimedia

PoliMedia links the minutes of the debates in the Dutch Parliament (Dutch Hansard) to the databases of historical newspapers and ANP radio bulletins to allow cross-media analysis of coverage in a uniform search interface. For each fragment from a single speaker in a debate, the developers extracted relevant information: the speaker, the date, important terms from its content and important terms from the description of the complete debate. This information was then combined to create a query with which they searched the archives of newspapers, radio bulletins and television programmes. Media items that corresponded to this query were retrieved and a link was created between the speech and the media item, creating a Semantic Web of Dutch Hansard and media coverage. This Semantic Web contains links from the Dutch Hansard to newspaper articles and radio bulletins. From evaluations it was found that there was a 62% recall and 75% precision. To navigate this Semantic Web, a search user interface was developed based on a requirements study with five scholars in history and political communication. The developers created a faceted search interface in which the Dutch parliamentary minutes can be searched in full-text and in which refinements can be performed based on the speaker, the role of the speaker (parliament of government), political party and year. These debates are presented with links to the original locations of the media items. Polimedia is a collaboration of the TU Delft and the Free University (development of Semantic Web of Dutch Hansard and media), the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (development of the search user interface) and Erasmus University Rotterdam (projectleader and user research of historians and political communication researchers).