P.A.R.P.C.A.M. : a Portal for Acquisition, Representation and Presentation of Current Affairs in Malta

Abstract

People from all around the world always strive to be informed about what is going on in the world they live in. They make use of different media such as television, radio and newspapers in order to be updated with the latest current affairs. For a long time this was achieved using traditional media. With the growth of the Internet several news agencies started publishing their news content online via web portals. One of the advantages associated with this method is the ability to publish news content as it happens. When an event takes place, every news agency will publish its own report on its respective web portal. Internet users usually browse through the major portals to read all the available content on the particular event. This presents a drawback for the user. Ideally, there should be one portal which lists all the news content from different sources according to its topic. However this is not trivial since news content is available in different formats and in different languages. In this final year project, we propose P.A.R.P.C.A.M. which is a portal for acquisition, representation and presentation of current affairs in Malta. Such a portal allows the users to view local news from different sources segmented by topic. The system is actually a structured repository of past and current local news. All the major news entities in Malta publish their content online. There are some who do this continuously during the day and others at fixed intervals. This content is available in both Maltese and English. We believe that the situation in Malta presents a challenging scenario for cross-lingual news topic analysis. We also believe that each user will have his/her particular interests and for this reason P.A.R.P.C.A.M. also includes user adaptive features.