viewKi: Prototype
Presented @ Science In The New Parliament 26-10-2010
Dr Will Simm w.simm@lancaster.ac.uk
The viewKi extends the VoiceYourView concept by allowing users to explore the comments received by the system. Before, users were presented with a non-interactive summary of comments received, now users can interact with the data and see what comments have been left by others, similar to their own.
Unfortunately the system is not yet robust enough to make publicly available (which of course is the eventual intention). This page describes the system as presented.
Data Sources
Data can be sourced by web entry, email, SMS, iPhone application and the vYv handsets. Since engaging people to comment and source our own commentary during a short research project is so difficult, we can also utilise open feeds from existing public commentary systems such as fixmystreet.
Future plans
This is a first prototype and many planned features are yet implemented including:
- Geocoding of addresses (using external providers inc. google, multimap etc) when specifying location.
- Allow users to edit the cluster view to show combinations of features (i.e. user may want to view comments similar to their by a combination of theme, location and actionability).
- User level access (including facebook login) - allowing the user to view a history of their own comments and interactions.
- Social media integration - Comments posted to facebook, twitter.
- Crowd sourcing of comment priority - as users explore the data, they can indicate if they agree or disagree with the comment - this will add priority to the comments for stakeholder summary.
- Probably many more....
Interaction
Click a screen shot for a high resolution version.
Adding a comment:
User adds a comment, specifying location (can be determined from browser). Comments can be added by all the input methods described above.
Linking Comments A:
Once entered, the comment is displayed with clusters representing metrics surrounding. A number of auto-tags are generated by metric plugins. Here themes from the comment are extracted and displayed in orange, actionability is classified and displayed in pink and sentiment coloured according to the sentiment of the comment (green=positive, red=negative yellow=neutral). The size of the cluster relates to the relative number of other comments tagged in the same way.
Linking Comments B:
Each of the metric clusters are "clickable" - when the user clicks through they are presented with the comments which are tagged with that metric value. These comments are again "clickable" - so the user can view the way in which that comment is tagged.
Visual Feedback for display and projection
A visualisation has been built, designed to be projected to give real time summary in location of comments as they come in. Whenever a new comment is received, the map display updates to show the location, comment and the tags.
Reporting for stakeholders
Since stakeholders such as local authorities, businesses and community groups will require a high level overview of the data, then charts are available to view the live contents of the comments received. It is intended that this view will be expanded to refine comments by location and time etc. as well as allowing metric selection.
