Science Observatory:

Overview

The aim of the Zientzia Behatokia project is to develop a platform capable of analysing the treatment and presence of science in the media. The system automatically collects news stories, identifies the content related to science and classifies and analyses it using a set of indicators. The results are shown on a graphical interface, allowing users to easily filter, order and interpret information.

Challenge

The biggest challenge was to continuously collect a large number of news stories and analyse them automatically, and to reliably identify their connection to science, the main themes, indicators, entities and evaluations. This information also had to be organised in a way that was useful to the user. It also offered the possibility of consulting easy-to-understand charts, filters and data.

Collaboration

It was developed in collaboration with Elhuyar’s Science Department.

Result

The result of the project is a functional platform capable of monitoring news stories related to science. The following aspects were developed: a module that collects news from RSS feeds, a pipeline that screens and processes the content, LLMs that calculate the indicator and a graphical interface for consulting the results. The interface was designed and developed with the help of several science communicators so that it would meet the needs of users. The system analyses the following indicators: general thematic descriptors, specific thematic descriptors, relevant people and their gender, relevant entities, interdisciplinary news stories, quality of the news stories and news stories related to the Sustainable Development Goals.