(Berkeley, 06 June 2007). A European team of researchers today announced the
official launch of the Media Watch on Climate Change Climate News Watch LINK, an award-winning Geospatial Web application. Google, NASA, ESRI and other technology leaders are sponsoring the 3D Visualization Grand Challenge and will be attending tomorrow's awards ceremony held at the University of California at Berkeley (www.isde5.org).

Aiming to increase awareness and the accessibility of environmental
information, the Media Watch provides a continuously updated account of
media coverage on climate change and related issues. The portal aggregates,
filters and visualizes environmental Web content from about 150
Anglo-American news media sites. Automated content analysis extracts
geospatial context to build a comprehensive, geotagged knowledge base. A
visual interface provides interactive access to this knowledge base. It
shows that geobrowsers are not only suited to explore geographic features,
but can also be used to render other types of imagery such as
three-dimensional Knowledge Planets.

Environmental communication and collaboration are crucial to conceiving and
implementing change on both regional and society-wide scales. Within the
next six months, the Media Watch will therefore be extended into an
interactive collaboratory for the scientific community, commercial entities,
and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - stakeholders often divided by
differing worldviews, goals and agendas.